Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry 9780231880756

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Destructive Poetics

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Paul A. Bové

Columbia University Press · N e w York · 1980

T h e A n d r e w W. Mellon Foundation, through a special grant, has assisted the Press in publishing this volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bo vé, Paul A 1949Destructive poetics. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. American poetry—History and criticism— Theory, etc. 2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 4. Criticism—United States. 5. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Olson, Charles, 1910-1970— Criticism and interpretation. 8. Phenomenology. 9. Hermeneutics. 10. Poetics. I. Title. PS78.B57 801'.951 79-24917 ISBN 0-231-04690-1

C o l u m b i a University Press N e w York Guildford, Surrey C o p y r i g h t © 1975, . 1980 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

for Carol

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xix

One: Literary History and Literary Interpretation: Toward a Theory of Poetic Destruction

1

Two: Heidegger's Phenomenological Destruction: A Theory of Poetic Interpretation

49

Three: Cleanth Brooks and Modern Irony: A Kierkegaardian Critique

93

Four: Leaves of Grass and the Center: Free Play or Transcendence

131

Five: Fiction, Risk, and Deconstruction: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

181

Six: The Particularities of Tradition: History and Locale in The Maximus Poems

217

Notes

283

Index

301

Preface

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it —Wallace Stevens

The literary history of Modern and Postmodern American poetry is being rewritten in the 1970s because much of this poetry throws into doubt the very language which Anglo-American critics normally use to write such histories. Furthermore, Modern poetry provides a more adequate, because less rigid, sense of poetic "tradition" upon which authentic literary history must "rest." The "history" of Modern and Postmodern poetry is largely the work of New Critics and academicians trained in the New Criticism. Although there have recently been many attempts to deal with Modern poetry from non-New Critical standpoints, I do not think they have succeeded in escaping fully the New Criticism's influence. Indeed, a deconstruction of the rhetoric of the New Critics and of some of its antagonists such as Harold Bloom, Walter Jackson Bate, Northrop Frye, and Roy Harvey Pearce to mention only a few, reveals that many of the recent alternatives to the New Criticism are really not substantially different from it at all. A destructive reading of Bate, Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, and to a lesser extent Paul de Man, shows that they all are caught within essentially the same metaphysical critical tradition. To varying degrees all of these critics' works—consciously or not—nostalgically reify an aesthetically [ix]

Preface ordered, often humanistic, tradition as an alternative to the radical flux, disorder, alienation and death which characterizes the Postmodern world. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the underlying antihistorical critical motives defending this "tradition," as well as to suggest the inevitable resultant misreading of this poetry as the agency of this reification. Although the book seemingly has two successive parts—a critical destruction of the Modern critical mind, and a destructive reading of the poetry of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson—the structure of the argument presented here is "actually" circular. For the most part, the condition for the possibility of performing the destruction of the traditional critical rhetorics in chapters one through three is an awareness of the nature of the poetry of "interpretation" or "destruction" which makes up the second part. In other words, experientially, the second half of this interpretation must have occurred first. The readings of the poems do not grow out of the "method" derived in the first chapters; rather, the awareness that the critical tradition needs to be destroyed emerges from my understanding that a great portion of Modern and Postmodern poetry refuses to be coerced into the concrete universale and aesthetic monads of Modernist criticism. T h e Modernist critical tradition begins to crack under a close reading of Wallace Stevens' poems, and it "breaks d o w n " completely when it is brought into contact with the poetry of Whitman and Olson. This book is, therefore, a record of a hermeneutic situation. When habitual modes of perception and expectation fail, authentic doubt and the sense of the "Ab-grund," of the "abyss," of the mise en abîme, which Modern critical rhetorics of "presence" obscure, deny the reader a secure unified perspective and cast the critic into the free play of interpretation. The traditionally privileged critical process based for so long upon both the myth of the objective analysis of autotelic texts and the stability of the self obscures the radical play of reading. The weakening of Modernist habits of reading which are based on critical theories of aesthetic distance ancj disinterest makes the Postmodern reader [x]

Preface aware of the potential for violence and novelty in every act of reading or interpretation, indeed, in every nonhabitual use of language. Beyond being the record of a hermeneutic situation, this book might demonstrate that Postmodern criticism should always be hermeneutic if it intends to be authentic. In fact, the second half of this text argues that Modern poetry, in its relation to the accumulated past, destroys the language, forms, tropes, and poems of the "tradition" projected by Modernist criticism. Confronted by a poetry which refuses an ideology of poetic disinterest projected by the Kantian New Criticism and some of its structuralist descendents, Postmodern critics can only turn to an equally hermeneutic, destructive, interpretive process of literary analysis and history. Ultimately, Modern and Postmodern poetry destroys the very notion of the "tradition," as long as that term means a reified aesthetic set of interrelations among texts. Indeed, the critique of the concept of Modernism's nostalgia for "tradition" can be extended beyond the limited sphere of literary history and analysis to the broader range of historical, philosophical, and discursive inquiry. As Charles Olson's Maximus Poems make eminently clear, the idea of "tradition" as defined above has no claim to privilege or priority: all particular "traditions" are historical, ideological fictions, i.e., unacknowledged myths, the creations of mystified minds. Modernist critical notions of "the tradition" disguise alienation, history, and absence. For the most part, the destruction of the Modern critical tradition in the first three chapters reveals that both the New Criticism and its antagonists can be called Gnostics "interested" in establishing the priority of word over world, presence over absence. Both Bate and Bloom, for example, create theories of poetic interrelationships which protect the "existence" of a sacrosanct "tradition" that is continuous and unchanging. The New Critics and their adherents likewise insist upon a poetics of "unmastered" irony which allows the individual poem, as artifact, to interpose itself as Image between the reader-poet-critic and the [xi]

Preface world. And, as my analysis of the specific New Critical evaluation of American poetry in the later chapters reveals, Brooks, Tate, Ransom, Wimsatt, and all the rest also insist upon a continuous, unchanging tradition maintained by the exclusive definition of poetry as ironic, closed form. Bate and Bloom are both intent upon establishing an ahistorical "psychological" model of belatedness and anxiety as more primordial than the linguistic model as a basis for understanding not only one poet's relation to his past, but also our critical relationships to the past and present. Yet the "psychological" model and its defining rhetoric of continuity and genealogy becomes in their work a way of disguising the Postmodern "dis-ease" caused by the historical uncertainty of our point of view in the act of reading. Bate and Bloom build their structures upon a centered language of presence, of absolute beginnings and ends. A hermeneutic analysis of their works not only reveals their mystification about the way in which their language brings along with it the entire logocentric or on to-theological "tradition," but it also discloses the truth of precisely what they attempt to deny: the past imposes itself as a burden upon the present not because of the psychological inadequacy of Modern writers but because the language itself is historical—used-up, reified, habitualized by the nostalgic metaphysical "tradition." Just as many literary histories maintain habitual aesthetic constructs as defenses against the potential for disorder which exists in the relationship among texts, so the New Critics in their insistence upon closed, ironic form create verbal monads which distance the poet and critic from the chaotic nothingness overlaid by demystified "fiction." Indeed, it is precisely at that point where the "traditional" insistence of Modernist critics upon a continuous "tradition" and the New Critics' demand for closed, ironic form intersect that my destruction comes to bear. Both literary histories and literary interpretations which are defined by closing off aesthetic forms—"tradition," or "concrete universal," or "competency"—from change and the world, are antithetical to the destructive process of Modern and Postmodern poetry. [xii]

Preface The poetry of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson is marked by its historical openness to the world and by its hermeneuticly subversive orientation toward the language and forms of the past. Demystified literary history and literary interpretation is marked by an awareness that all genuine uses of language are destructive, that is, that they stand oriented towards the future in a discontinuous, nonimitative relation to the verbal events of the past. Paul de Man approximates such a literary theory, but he remains blind in his claim for the absolute démystification of every poet. In fact, I would claim in opposition to de Man, not only critical discourse is marked by the blindness-insight structure he identifies, but every use of language. Therefore, to expose what lies hidden in blindness, language must be historically destructive. This fact discloses to the critic a complex interrelationship among literary texts, literary interpretations, and the poetic destructions of "natural" or "normal" interpretations of earlier texts. The "tradition" as an unchanging, idealized order in which writer and reader must be competent is upset when close attention is paid to the destabilizing potential of language to disclose and to cover-over. A critic who is aware of the complex interactions among texts does not stand in any simple relationship to one closed "object" which he can describe. Rather, through inter textuality, i.e., the open form of the destructive language event which is the poem, the critic is placed into a historical relation with earlier readings of the poem and with those traditional uses of language which the poem, to the degree that it is authentic, is questioning. The N e w Critical aesthetic monad is broken down in this context as well as the genealogical, Bloomian model of a continuous post-Miltonic tradition. In the place of these traditional aesthetic units which cut man off from the world and time, there emerges an ever-changing set of relationships in which neither the poem nor the critic can function as a determined or determinable center. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger develops an ontological and existential theory of human being, understanding, and [xiii]

Preface language which indicates precisely the simultaneously dual potential of all language to tell the truth and to lie. O n the one hand, poetry can be reified into a "tradition" obscuring the original discoveries sedimented in language. And, on the other hand, poetry can reopen the site of the past, to examine the historical sedimentation and to make possible discoveries. Although Heidegger explains how the nature of Dasein's understanding (Verständnis) can reify as well as dis-cover, he develops a way of approaching the past in which the potentiality for authentic disclosure can be actualized and itself stand revealed. Heidegger's own project is to destroy the history of metaphysics in order to show how it has covered-over the Being-question and Man's basic temporality. T o do this, he needs to reveal how the habitual use of language in metaphysics leads philosophers to ignore Being as such (and temporality as the ground of Dasein's Being) to attend only to beings. Heidegger, thus, regains from past texts, like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the dis-closures about Being that philosophers "wanted" to make but were unable to because of their historical position within the language of "tradition." The poetry of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson stands in a relation to the poetic past which is similar to Heidegger's stance toward the metaphysical tradition; each of these poets tries in some way to break open the impediment which traditional continuous genetic models have become to the founding of new "traditions," to the future. Although he remains blind to the language of Emersonian idealism, Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, is extensively destructive. Stevens is more aware of the habits of past language than Whitman is and turns the major dualistic and quest metaphors of the Romantic tradition against themselves to reveal that they "disclose" the "nothing" which is at the "heart of utterance." Charles Olson, in The Maximus Poems, also subverts the traditional language of abstract concepts and ironic symbols to displace not only the continuous linearity of the Western onto-theological tradition, but to discover that the very notions both of "tradition" as a centered canon and of "history" [xiv]

Preface are Western myths used to defend the aesthetic, distanced, disinterested privilege of antihistorical metaphysics. The broken, temporal, "open" forms of the poetry of these writers resist New Critical and structural attempts to impose upon them the teleological, ironic, atemporal, distanced structures of the reifying West. The historicity of these poets lies in their insistence upon a poetics of "dis-closure," of opening up the horizon of meaning which habitual expectations and forms close off. Whitman and Olson are radically open in their forms. That is, the works of both can be epitomized in the figure of the voyager who reenacts his discoveries as he makes them, and not afterward in a moment of recollection. While Stevens is admittedly less "spontaneous" than Whitman and Olson, nonetheless, particularly in his long poems and late lyrics, he abruptly shifts from topic to topic and perception to perception in his destructive "play" among the various "fictions" which "present" themselves. Whitman and Olson project a "figure of outward" who journeys unendingly through the "Penetralium"; Stevens' equivalent encounter with "mystery" lies in the constant penetration to nothingness which his various texts make in their testing of the traditional forms and tropes of poetry. Perhaps, ultimately, this text should suggest h o w the range and complexity of the interpret tive interaction established by one poem's destructive relation to the tradition prohibits any privileged or "complete" reading of a text. Indeed, it prevents any "reading" which is not always itself fluctuating in some relationship between the "truth" and "error" of the poem which is being "misread" and the interpretation's own dual potential for simultaneously disclosing and reifying. Thus, no certainty should arise or should be felt to arise in any reading of a poem or any reading of an interpretation of a poem. Indeed, the very possibility of distilling the "purpose" and "goals" of this text into a prefatory statement threatens to fix in some way, in schematic or outline form, the very uncertain, changing patterns of relations which might emerge. The lack of any methodologically or thematically "prior" chapter or statement allows a series of "inter-actions" to emerge from the ele[XV]

Preface ments of the discussion. T h e destructive wandering through the "traditional" critical assumptions of genetic, dialectical, N e w Critical, and structural methods often requires, as in an Olson p o e m , that I touch certain spots in m y trip several times. Thus, for example, the critique of the N e w Criticism is not restricted beforehand to the third chapter on Brooks. As the poetry of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson reveals different, particular aspects of the general truth about the N e w Criticism's static metaphysics, the destruction of the N e w Criticism expands, pushing back the horizon of meaning as more of the mystification of the N e w Criticism comes to consciousness in this repetition. Because of the necessarily "process-ional" nature of the text any "pre-face" must inevitably be a lie. A "pre-face" suggests a well-organized, thought-out-in-advance series of analyses which are written to satisfy the program's "intention." It is precisely such intellectual and formal priority which Whitman, Stevens, and Olson attack in literature and Heidegger in philosophy. A "pre-face" expresses a commitment to a methodological, rhetorical, and ultimately metaphysical stance. Precisely h o w to destroy the presence of this "Preface" presents a unique problem for the destructive approach: "destruction" founders when it must be turned back upon itself. Destructive reading always presupposes as part of the hermeneutical situation the closure of a historical period, a breakd o w n within the traditional language being examined, and the discovery of contradiction. A destructive misreading must, therefore, emerge from a partially "privileged" position, an incomplete understanding of what the mystified rhetoric of another discourse is covering-over. When, however, the opening up of the horizon of meaning involves destroying one's o w n rhetorical stance, the destructive process is brought up short by the necessary "error" or "blindness" of one's o w n position. T h e historical " c o v e r - u p " of one's o w n destructive rhetoric is not available for destruction until the time when that rhetoric has itself been displaced. As Kierkegaard's model of the "stages on life's w a y " points out, "repetition," i.e., a destructive rereading of one's [xvi]

Preface o w n stance, cannot be successfully accomplished until the prior position is n o longer seen to " w o r k , " when it "fails" as a means of discovery, that is, when "history passes." At that time, a new incomplete understanding emerges f r o m the previous rhetoric or model and a "repetition" with a difference of the "same" problems and materials becomes possible and necessary. Until the point where one's o w n period is "closed," when one's o w n rhetoric n o longer " w o r k s , " the destruction of one's own rhetoric is partially impossible and, to some extent, one's own language and program tend to solidify and misrepresent. Rhetorically, the presence of a "pre-face" to an interpretation demands of its reader, as well as of its writer, an immediate attempt to subvert it, to disclose the possible limitations which its o w n " p r o g r a m " necessitates. T h e formal structure of a text cannot be assumed to be linear and progressive. Therefore, the potential priority of a "pre-face" must be thrown instantaneously into doubt by its very fictional existence as a "beginning." Even though this particular "pre-face" is being written after the act of composing the book and, in effect, continues it, its rhetorical function as a "preface" creates the illusion of a beginning. Potentially, all prefatory and concluding statements threaten to mislead the reader into an inauthentic encounter with the text. Prefaces cover-over the disclosing, process-ional nature of the critical act and can obscure the very nature of reading as a dangerous, fluctuating event. By their very presence, "pre-faces" invite the reader to perform a destruction to reveal what the schematization of the pursuant process covers-up. It demands a hermeneutical misreading of what follows in order to preserve the misreading f r o m reifi cation.

[xvii]

Acknowledgments

During the time I have spent working on this book, I have incurred innumerable intellectual and personal debts. To Robert Kroetsch and Gerald Gillespie, I am thankful for limitless time and generosity in the early stages of this project. I am also grateful to those many colleagues at Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature whose openness and support made revisions and improvements possible. I would like especially to thank those who have taken the time to read and comment on various sections of this book: George Stade, Joseph Mazzeo, Karl Kroeber, Steven Marcus, Michael Wood, and Edward W. Said. The lucid critical eye of my dear friend Michael Hays has been a support far beyond the limits of this book. Friends and colleagues in other places have been helpful in similar ways. It was a great pleasure and help to have had the detailed reading of the manuscript which Joseph Riddel so graciously provided. Very little, fortunately, slips past his eye. Ute Castleman gave freely of her friendship and typing. To my dear friend, Dan O'Hara—our lives have touched so often—I owe much of what education and feeling I have. To my parents, I owe the joy of the desire to learn and to think. For that incomparable gift, I cannot give thanks. My brother, Mark, knows what love I owe him for his presence. To William V. Spanos, who as my teacher, for five years constantly made me see and hear anew, I can truly offer no proper thanks. What he has given and still continues to give far exceeds—as it does for all great teachers—even that of which he is aware. I hope someday I can reciprocate this to this man who "can't get away from the old measure of care." [xix]

Acknowledgments It would normally be the greatest joy for me to thank Carol for her intellectual, emotional, and practical support through the long years of this project. But her concern that in doing so I would fall into the worst of clichés prohibits my doing so. As usual she is right. The love and debts I owe to her as meager exchange remain properly where they belong, closed off in our own silence. For permission to reprint parts of chapters one and three, I want to thank the editors of Union Seminary Quarterly Review and boundary 2. I wish to thank Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to quote from Wallace Stevens' Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse, © 1957; and The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens, © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens. I also want to thank Jargon/Corinth Books for permission to cite Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, © 1960 by Charles Olson.

[xx]

Destructive Poetics

Chapter One

Literary History and Literary Interpretation: Toward a Theory of Poetic Destruction ι Since 1970 there has been a renewal of critical interest in the nature of poetic interrelationships, in problems of influence, and generally in the theory and practice of literary history. Contemporary criticism has grown dissatisfied with Modern formalist— and even "Postmodern" structuralist—impulses which have periodized literature into static "worldviews" 1 and ignored the problems of poetic interrelationships in their commitment to the autotelic poetic structure. Among those who have tried to confront these issues in the United States are Walter Jackson Bate in The Burden of the Past, Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, and Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight and his essays on Nietzsche. 2 All of these texts begin from the position that the N e w Criticism is unsatisfactory as a critical approach to these problems—even though the nature of its insufficiency is not fully developed—and, in their diverse ways, each of these writers tries to return an awareness of "history" and of poetic inheritance not only to literary history but to literary interpretation as well. In fact, to different degrees they all deny the possibility of separating history and interpretation. Although they all debunk the N e w Critical "periodization" of literature into static pictures,

Poetic Destruction they d o not all present similar or even adequate ideas of history on their o w n . Yet, they all recognize the necessary interrelationship between literary interpretation and the methodological possibilities of doing literary history. A survey of their ipproaches to this relationship not only suggests some of the reasons for its necessity, but also points toward the failure of traditional positivistic histories to treat adequately literary language. Bate's book is certainly the simplest introduction into the entire area since it is so traditional in approach. It begins by posing the problem of the existence of poetic predecessors and by defining it as one of the hallmarks of " m o d e r n " art: I have often wondered whether we could find any more comprehensive way of taking up the whole of English poetry during the last three centuries—or for that matter the modern history of the arts in general—than by exploring the effects of this accumulating anxiety and the question it so directly presents to the poet or artist: What is there Ιφ to do? (BP, 3) Bate's theme, then, is the mental or psychological anguish which results f r o m the mere accumulation of the past, of the "traditional" in art and poetry. His method is to proceed historiographically, not merely to record the facts of this accumulating anxiety, but to examine the responses of various burdened generations of poets to their own historical situation. However, Bate's intent is not only to examine this anxiety and these poets' o w n interpretive responses to it, but also to show that these responses are inadequate because they shy away from the most likely and most painful explanation, i.e., David Hume's theory that it "is the writer's loss of self-confidence as he compares what he feels able to do with the rich heritage of past art and literature" which leads inevitably to poetic decline (BP, 7; cf. pp. 80-85). This "heritage" continually expands and accretes, closing off possibilities as it develops. The "moderns' " confrontation with this achieved tradition—which they have been trained to admire (BP, 107)—can lead to neuroses and stagnation: [2]

Poetic Destruction the essential problem—the real anxiety—. . . is [the artist's] nakedness and embarrassment (with the inevitable temptations to paralysis and routine imitation, to retrenchment or mere fitful rebellion) before the amplitude of what two thousand years or more of an art had already been able to achieve. And meanwhile, with every generation, our sense of that amplitude—its variety in subject, in approach, in power or ingenuity of expression—has been further increasing as (justifiably, commendably) we continue to explore that heritage and extend our understanding of it. (BP, 95) Ongoing exploration and development, according to Bate, requires "distinction" or "difference," that is, a marking off of the works of one generation or of one poet from its or his immediate predecessor. HoweVer, the problem of the past results from its accumulation into a continuously existing, ever-present collocation of an almost exhausted elaboration of variety. Thus, tradition for Bate is essentially defined, despite his emphasis on "difference" and its suggestion of discontinuity, by a continuity of achievement which, as it were, crowds out " n e w " achievement, that is, other variations within the essential tradition. H e epitomizes the problem as he sees it in this question: "Does not the essence of our heritage in the humanities and the arts involve the preservation of the best that has been so gradually, and against such odds, attained in the past?" (BP, 90). Bate "diagnose[s]" (BP, pp. 52-53; passim) the cause of the decline of the arts as the inability of "modern" poets to overcome their own "psychological complexities" (BP, 7). After discounting all of the 18th century's poets' theories as to why they could produce no epics or Shakespeares as evasions of their own freedom and responsibility to stand "boldly" (BP, 132f) in the face of the tradition, he offers this set of rhetorical questions: Was it, after all, a case of simple psychological inhibition . . . ? Could this widespread feeling that the "advance" (or complication) of what we call civilization was unpropitious to poetry—that it seriously hampered the poet and would in time seriously hamper the artist generally—be explained more sim13]

Poetic Destruction ply, and most truthfully, by psychological factors, by the universal human hope to make a genuine contribution and the fact that in the past so much had already been done so well that it seemed impossible to compete in the same way? Was the mere existence of die past beginning to exert an enormous pressure on poetry and forcing it into less promising directions? (BP, 80) Bate's avowed purpose in this text is twofold: to pose for us, in general, this central problem—to express the hope that we can pluck it out into the open and try to see it for what it is—and, second, to help us reground ourselves, to get a clearer idea of our bearings, by looking back with a fresh eye to the beginning drama of what we ourselves are now living with and feel so deep a need to bring into perspective. (BP, 13) In other words, Bate is not only offering a diagnosis for the disease, but he is also prescribing a cure. Once we become aware that our sense of being latecomers, as Harold Bloom calls us, is merely an illusion, a result of our own neurosis which has been obscured until now by our ideational explanations of the decline of the West and the exhaustion of language, we can take proper steps to "demystify" ourselves and presumably halt the actual decline in the arts which results unnecessarily from our illusion. Bate points to the Romantics' temporary victory over the weight of their predecessors as a temporary halt in the steady movement downward in the arts begun at the Renaissance. The Romantics derive their strength from the 18th century's ideas of genius and greatness which, of course, for Neo-Classical doctrine, have their roots in Longinus (BP, 114-34). "Greatness" provides the 18th century with a "bedrock" of possible "value" (BP, 128); it teaches that "we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call 'circumstances,' . . . but that . . . with th e great we can become freer . . . " (BP, 129). The ideal of "greatness"—which culminates, of course, in the 19th century's "hero-worship cult"—inspires "boldness" so that the artist can get beyond what he feels as the limitations of his past to seize [4]

Poetic Destruction "opportunities and create new ones" (BP, 127). Ultimately, to overcome the burden, as the Romantics were able to do, is not only a matter of aesthetics, of art, but of "the freedom of man (that freedom so indispensable to achievement) to follow openly and directly what he most values . . . " (BP, 133). Having achieved this diagnosis and having cured ourselves, we can establish a normative relationship to our predecessors and our tradition. We can continue to develop it by adding simply another possible variation to an already achieved series of permutations. Freed of needless anxiety, then, and assured of our ability to get beyond our place on the temporal horizon of creativity, we confront our past with boldness, that is, "directly facing up to what we admire and then trying to be like it . . ." (BP, 132). The seductiveness of Bate's prose and the appealing simplicity of his diagnosis and cure tempts one into accepting his analysis of the "moderns' " relationship to their predecessors. However, a closer look at the rhetorical structures of his study shows that it proceeds from an unacceptable linguistic and methodological basis which he assumes unselfconsciously, naturally, as it were. Not all of the possible objections which could be made against Bate's rhetoric are relevant here, except to show the degree to which he leaves his language unexamined and in need of destruction. One rhetorical pattern is of primary importance, though, because it defines and structures, limits and confines, his method and insight: the privileged, i.e., unexamined and "central" metaphor of growth-decay. Like all interpretation, Bate's proceeds in a circle.3 His method and his theme complement each other so that he must necessarily "prove" his contentions and at the same time remain unaware of alternatives. It is neither to the point nor is it possible to say if his method precedes his theme or vice-versa. Priority itself is an issue for the method and theme of the text Bate creates. He uncritically assumes a genetic model for the problem he is discussing: a beginning of the burden of the past, its growth into a middle of paralysis, and its end or death in an awareness that the entire problem is a neurotic illusion. Some of the com[5]

Poetic Destruction m o n variants of this model involve the rhetoric of the Fall from some unburdened perfection in the past and the language of nostalgia and loss, of longing to return to that mythic, nonneurotic origin. As a result of these rhetorics and controlling metaphors, his narrative is not only historical, but historiographical as well; that is, it assumes and, in fact, requires the continuity of the subject being "historicized," i.e., the tradition; it makes possible both the cure of "boldness" into which the modern poet must g r o w and also the disease into which he first fell with Dryden and Descartes (BP, vii, 31). Because Bate's language is not self-conscious, that is, because it does not reflect back upon itself in its o w n terms and question its o w n rhetoric, it creates the " m y t h " 4 of the burden of the past, sui generis, and provides a cure for a disease which is invented only so that the cure could be effective. Because the past, the tradition, is a continuous whole, it is ever-present to the mind of the modern. There seems to be no escape f r o m it—the diseased illusion is that escape is valuable or needed—despite the attempts at originality which dominate modern art. It leaves the latecomer less and less imaginative space as it grows monolithically. Paralysis results f r o m this confrontation with the past which seems to have entrapped us and determined the possibilities of our creation. This illusion fades after it is recognized as such and the poet is once again able, in an imaginative renewal, to be like what comes before, to draw upon the accumulated past which is constantly present before him. In this way, the poet achieves freedom f r o m time as history, f r o m any undesirable restraints which being a poet with a national, linguistic, and cultural past might impose. Yet the poet is not cut adrift; he can never get beyond the tradition because the tradition is a continuous unit which can be explored and modified, but not disrupted without "degenerating" "into the various forms of anti-art," (BP, 10) which for those still caught in the illusion seems to be the only, but barren, future. Thus, Bate's genetic model, which he hopes to provide to Modern poets and readers, provides him with the exact release [6]

Poetic Destruction from anxiety stemming from an uncomfortable historical relation with the past. H e remains, as Paul de Man would say, blind to his own insight. N o t only does he not see how his own "explanation" and "cure" is no less an evasion of the burden of the past and the lessons of temporality than those he claims the 18th century devised to free itself from admitting its own weaknesses. In fact, he seems unaware of the "real" subject of his text: the burden of the past is not psychological illusion but unexamined, habitual, linguistic assumptions, rhetoric, and analogues such as the genetic model. Bate "proves" precisely that which he sets out to disprove: the accumulated past's usurpation of language pressures the Modern. The past reifies language into fixed patterns which seem self-evident but are, in fact, only unexamined and therefore habitual (BP, 87).

II Although in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading Harold Bloom develops a more extended and sophisticated version of the psychological model of poetic interrelationships than Bate, he nonetheless can be accused of falling into similar rhetorical patterns. But any attempt to question Bloom cannot proceed from empirical refutations of his specific readings. Rather, his texts must be deconstructed to reveal in two of his early theoretical works, the unprivileged nature of his rhetoric, and perhaps more importantly, the relation to the world at stake in viewing literature and criticism from his idiosyncratic but influential perspective. The Anxiety of Influence contains many undestroyed tropes which structure Bloom's thesis and reflect his concerns and prejudices, the habits of his mind and writing. A Map of Misreading crystallizes the importance of two of these tropes: first, the genetic metaphor and its variants—the myth of the Fall, the idea of origins, the language of loss and nostalgia, and the ultimate death of poetry; second, the rhetoric of dualism and its transfer[7]

Poetic Destruction mations—the Cartesian isolation of the self, the quest to escape nature and time, the Gnostic desire for godhead, and the melancholy insistence on the priority of mind over matter. Bloom's analysis of the life cycle of the poet as poet introduces the genetic pattern of birth, growth, and death (AI, 8). He immediately extends it to the larger scale of literary history, which he tropes as a "family romance," a metaphor which generates itself from the initial scene of the poetic selection of Oedipus (AI, 10), which grows into a "family" of poets in the tradition, and which dies out in the funereal poetry of Modern and Postmodern writers (AI, 8, 10, 56-57). In other words, the structure of genealogy lies behind both Bloom's description of the psychological processes within one poet anxiously confronting the past and also his more "historical" attempt to describe a "truer" literary history based upon poetic melancholy. As an implicit rhetorical structure, genealogy, the genetic pattern, provides an unquestioned base for Bloom's entire enterprise. As in Bate's The Burden of the Past, it guarantees the "results" of the investigation. It prejudices the discussion of all the issues, and it acts as the linguistic matrix which "generates" meaning and understanding. There is no semantic value in Bloom's work beyond this rhetorical pattern. Simultaneously and intrinsically intertwined with the genetic pattern is the theme and rhetoric of dualism. Like Bate, Bloom discovers the "origin" of anxiety in the dualism which arises in Descartes' separation of the intensive cogito and the res extensa (AI, 33-34). The "Covering Cherub" is, in fact, made possible as a metaphor only by the Cartesian extensiveness which separates objects in space and events in time (AI, 38). It is this Cartesian dualism which is the defining characteristic of Modern poetry (AI, 39). Unlike Pauline dualism, it produces melancholy, not moral obligation. The rhetorics of dualism and genealogy intersect in the theme of birth and priority. The argument of The Anxiety of Influence is that all strong poets, like Wordsworth in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," try to overcome the priority of nature and [8]

Poetic Destruction time and necessarily fail (AI, 9-10). T h e independently existing "external" world claims priority over the poetic mind and restricts its freedom and comfort: "For every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death's necessity than all other men and w o m e n d o " (AI, 10). O f course, according to Bloom, the acute anxiety of the poet emerges f r o m a fear of t w o deaths: the physical death of the human being threatens the absolute freedom and priority of the "cogito, "and the inhibiting temporal struggle with the poetic precursors promises "poetic" death. Thus, the poet's quest is for temporal priority over his fathers as well as for hierarchical priority or authority over nature. T h e poet's desire is to be not only his own father and to displace his "real" father, but to be the parent of those w h o give birth to him in what Bloom, echoing Freud, calls the "Primal Scene of Instruction," the m o m e n t of "Election-Love" when the poet is called and answers (MM, 54). Bloom sees the entire poetic enterprise encapsulated in this "revisionist" relationship between poet and precursors and poet and nature. In order to make imaginative space for himself and to avoid being smothered by the precursor, every poet misreads his father: " T o revise the precursor is to lie, not against being, but against time, and askesis is peculiarly a lie against the truth of time, the time in which the ephebe hoped to attain an autonomy already tainted by time, ravaged by otherness" (AI, 130). T e m porality which insists upon a past violates the poet's desired authority, but duality which isolates the ephebe f r o m the "outside" also separates him f r o m the work of his precursor. In the m o ment of his birth as a poet, then, he is instantaneously violated in his integrity and self-sufficiency because the texts and poets which elect him are not immediate, but " o t h e r . " Bloom must be quoted at length to clarify his use of the rhetoric of birth and its intersection with the language of dualism: H o w do men become poets, or to adopt an older phrasing, how is the poetic character incarnated? When a potential poet

[9]

Poetic D e s t r u c t i o n first discovers (or is discovered by) the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal to himself, he begins a process that will end only when he has no more poetry within him, long after he has the power (or desire) to discover it outside himself again. Though all such discovery is a self-recognition, indeed, a Second Birth, and ought, in the pure good of theory, be accomplished in a perfect solipsism, it is an act never complete in itself. Poetic influence is the sense— amazing, agonizing, delighting—of other poets, as felt in the depths of the all-but-perfect solipsist, the potentially strong poet. For the poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves. The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendor of being found by poems—great poems—outside him. T o lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever. (AI, 25-26) T h e violation of this poetic " c e n t e r " o f a u t o n o m y is the pivot of B l o o m ' s criticism as well as of his claim that all p o e m s are of this origin or birth (MM, 54, 62). T h i s passage also clarifies the central issue for B l o o m and, he w o u l d argue, for all postCartesian poets. T e m p o r a l i t y and d u a l i s m — t h e past and the other—create an anxiety w h i c h is n o t existential, b u t which is analogous t o the threat w h i c h m a n y o f Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" authors feel w h e n their absolute f r e e d o m to transcend the actual is in any w a y restricted by t i m e or n a t u r e . 5 T h e poetic enterprise, then, m u s t be an a t t e m p t to reachieve the priority lost in the Fall into Cartesian t i m e and dualism. B l o o m ' s interest in the Primal Scene o f Instruction in A Map of Misreading fills o u t the genetic structure o f The Anxiety of Influence. In the sixth and final section o f his analysis of the Primal Scene the critical act returns the p o e m of the son successfully to the b e g i n n i n g , i.e., to the m o m e n t he is called to b e a poet. This return is a " s o u r c e " b o t h o f the " r e v i s i o n i s m " of the p o e m in general as it swerves a w a y f r o m its predecessors and of the possibility o f the practical act of criticism which, like B l o o m ' s o w n w o r k in these t w o b o o k s , proceeds f r o m this m o m e n t as a firm

[10]

Poetic Destruction " g r o u n d . " T h e fifth phase of the Primal Scene only establishes that each poem is "a total interpretation or lidrosh [the term comes from Lurianic Kabbalism] of the poem or poetry of origins" (MM, 54). However, neither the critic nor the poet can rest in this mere interpretation of a text about the birth of the poet in the prior m o m e n t of selection: "In this phase, all of Blake or of Wordsworth becomes a reading or interpretation of Milton" (MM, 54). T h e poet and critic must push back further beyond the verbal articulation or interpretation of " o r i g i n " as it appears in the precursor's poetry. The successful quest needs to be complete and to establish its priority and autonomy: " T h e sixth and final phase of our Primal Scene is revisionism proper, where origins are re-created, or at least a re-creation is attempted, and it is in this phase that a newer practical criticism can begin, at several levels, including the rhetorical" (MM, 54). For Bloom, repetition is the means of achieving this return to origins. Basing his argument upon a misreading of Kierkegaard—he identifies Kierkegaard's "repetition" with Hegel's "mediation" 6 —Bloom concludes that repetition's "aesthetic displacement would re-affirm dialectically the continued possibility of becoming a great poet" (MM, 58). It would be a means of alleviating anxiety caused by the seeming irreversibility of time and the priority of the father. T h e splendor of being a great poet only "can be reached through the mediation of repetition, by a return to origins and the incommensurable Election-Love that the Primal Scene of Instruction can bestow, there at the point of origin" (MM, 58-59). Bloom's unquestioning evaluation of the "origin" and, therefore, of the entire genealogical quest implicit in his rhetoric lies in the establishment of poet, and knowing critic, as godhead, as the O n e capable of transcending time, its consequences, and the dependency upon the " o t h e r " of the Cartesian dualism: " T h e compulsion to repeat the precursor's patterns is . . . an attempt to recover the prestige of origins, the oral authority of a prior Instruction" (MM, 59). A fuller sense of the aspiration to divinity emerges f r o m this admission: "Poetic repetition quests, despite IH]

Poetic Destruction itself, for the mediated vision of the fathers, since such mediation holds open the perpetual possibility of one's own sublimity, one's election to the realm of the true Instructors" (MM, 59). Bloom's misreading of Kierkegaard's repetition as a concern for possibility, is in fact typical of those who, according to Kierkegaard, cannot make the movement of repetition, but remain caught in the aesthetic stasis of recollection, i.e., of a mythic attempt to transcend time, to refuse the limitations of actuality in favor of the "perpetual possibility" open only to those who are not of the world and flesh.7 The dualistic language of inner and outer worlds, of higher and lower, and of world and spirit compels Bloom to this movement out of time. For Kierkegaard, of course, Spirit and World are absurdly combined by virtue of the paradox of the Incarnation. For the post-Cartesian and, we might say, pre-existential Bloom, the inherence of the " t w o " worlds is an impossibility forbidden by his rhetoric and his own aspiration to sublimity. In The Anxiety of Influence, he insists upon the necessity of dualism to critic and poet (AI, 33, 34, 38-39, 40, 71-72). Dualism is not only the "source" of poetic anxiety, but it is a fiction necessary to Bloom's claims that all poets and critics of strength must be Gnostics (AI, 84-85, 130). The rhetoric of dualism and of origins compels the conclusion that poets quest for a way out of time and the world and not merely for some imaginative space not filled by their predecessors. The movement out of the world and time can only be justified if the "world," the "other" is Gnostically devalued and thus seen as inhibiting the creation of poetry itself. The metaphor of the "end" or "conclusion" is of complementary importance in Bloom and it also results in the suspension of time and of the priority of the world over the mind. In the state of apophrades, the last of six phases of poetic misinterpretation outlined in The Anxiety of Influence, the end of the poet's growth marks his victory over time and his predecessors. It is the completion of the movement of "repetition." The tone [12]

Poetic Destruction and wording of Bloom's description of this final phase are of importance in understanding its significance for poet and critic: The apophrades, the dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead return to inhabit their former houses, come to the strongest poets, but with the very strongest there is a grand and final revisionary movement that purifies even this last influx. Yeats and Stevens, the strongest poets of our century, and Browning and Dickinson, the strongest of the later nineteenth century, can give us vivid instances of this most cunning of revisionary ratios. For all of them achieve a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors. (AI, 141; all italics but the last are mine.)

The undestroyed language which Bloom uses leads to the sacredness of origins and ends. In the practical criticism of an individual poem or poet, according to this scheme, there is no value attached to time or history or to the place or position of the poem in the world. Poetic value, for Bloom, lies not in the process of getting to the end or in the events occurring along the way—except insofar as they share in the importance of the end— but only in the achieved return to origins and victory over time and the world. In fact, all of the stages along the way are hindrances; they restrict the poet-critic's freedom and autonomy; they interfere with attempts to do away with the journey, the actual and historical, and to "arrive" at the telos of divinity and timelessness. On the scale of literary history, "tradition" becomes the timeless order of strong poets, who, since the Renaissance, have been engaged in forging this order of poetic interrelationships by establishing their own priority to time and matter. The problem of "tradition" is a complicated one in Bloom and it is perhaps the one issue upon which his attempt founders more than any other. However, before this critique can be undertaken, another aspect of his critical machinery, i.e., the "trope," must be introduced. [13]

Poetic Destruction Strong poets feel threatened by the entire complex of phenomena we have been describing, but most centrally by time, the separate world, and death. Literary figures, tropes, are, according to Bloom, defense mechanisms employed by those poets against these pressures (MM, 75). When the poetic father stands between the poet and the moment of his poetic origin as a block threatening to isolate the son from the sources of poetic vitality, the son must necessarily swerve to avoid the father. While this difficult task is underway—and only the strongest poets can ever return to the moment of their calling when they were solipsisti call y complete—the son, the ephebe, must protect himself from the anxiety of possible poetic death which the blocking father, the Covering Cherub, threatens. T o avoid the pain of the temporal priority of father and of the poetic need for the Other, N a ture, or earlier poetical texts, the poet, and even the critic, "tropes" earlier texts as a way of turning them aside and freeing the road to the origins. Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey, for example, presents "a defensive interpretation of the invocations to Books III and VII" of Paradise Lost (MM, 61). Bloom is quite specific, however, in naming what is behind the practical goal of using Wordsworth to explicate Milton and vice versa, as well as in clearing up what is fundamentally at stake in the exercise of these tropes: "A defense . . . is a psychic operation or process directed against change, change that might disturb the ego as a stable entity" (MM, 92). In literary terms, this definition is refined to mean that each trope is, in relation to the precursor, a defense against an earlier trope. As a result, literary history, according to Bloom, is the continuous record of these attempts to protect the self from external and internal pressures. Ultimately, in achieving the origin and the end, these tropes succeed in their "lie against time and nature" (AI, 130) which is needed to protect the poet's autonomy and priority. The impulse upon which literary history is centered then is an attempt to detemporalize the poetic act and poetic existence. Critically, the goal is the recognition or reestablishment of an order of poets which is continuous and which safeguards the self—now the critical as well as [14]

Poetic Destruction the poetic self—from the chaos of why poems are written and how they are read. In Bloom's idea of "revisionism" we find an emphasis, as in Bate, on the poetic difference from one's forebears. Such difference can, of course, take any number of forms, six phases of which are described in The Anxiety of Influence. We find, h o w ever, that, just as in Bate, Bloom's idea of "difference" is carefully designed not to allow for any radical break from the tradition and, therefore, for real discontinuity—if such is possible—but merely for "swerves" away from the immediate predecessor at a certain point of his achievement. In other words, tradition, in Bloom's work, is marked by continuity and not by disruption, inversion, or radical difference. Any break in the unified tradition might introduce change as a threat to the stable identity of the ego or to the narcissistic will. Just as the trope functions as a defense for the ego of the poet, tradition functions for the critics as a defense against chaos: "if tradition cannot establish its own centrality, it becomes something other than the liberation from time's chaos it implicidy promises to be" (MM, 28). Critically, and poetically, then, tradition must be defined by stable continuity and it must be so strongly impressed upon the latecomers that it becomes a habit: Though each generation of critics rightly reaffirms the aesthetic supremacy of Homer, he is so much a part of the aesthetic given for them (and us) that the re-affirmation is a redundancy. What we call "literature" is inescapably connected to education by a continuity of twenty-five hundred years, a continuity that began in the sixth century B.C. when Homer first became a Schoolbook for the Greeks. (MM, 33-34)

Bloom's articulation of the reduction of the tradition to habit is completely accurate, as far as it goes. He sees the tradition as a necessary context—or intertext—in which all creativity must act and from which it must be generated. The tradition is a closed system from which escape or divergence is futile: "If you will not have one instructor or another, then precisely by rejecting all [15]

Poetic Destruction instructors you will condemn yourself to the earliest Scene of Instruction that imposed itself upon y o u . " The only creative stance in the face of tradition which will produce difference and continuity is repetitive and circular: " T h e clearest analogue is Oedipal; reject your parents vehemently enough, and you will become a belated version of them, but compound with their reality, and you may partly free yourself" (MM, 38). The repetitive movement of imitating the precursors' patterns within a continuous tradition and then swerving away to provide variety or difference leads to the reclaimed origins of the Scene of Instruction and the final inversion of time in apophrades. Inscribed within this scheme, Bloom must argue that all strong poets and critics are Gnostics. Throughout his work, Bloom offers his theory as an alternative to what he calls Spiritualists and deconstructive critics. It is quite ironic, of course, that his insistence upon Gnosticism is as "spiritualistic" a type of criticism as any within the tradition. H e has not "swerved" as much as he hopes. The value which he places upon escaping the earth into the "perpetual possibility" of inverted priority is the necessary conclusion of adopting the rhetoric of genealogy and dualism so unquestioningly. Furthermore, much of A Map of Misreading is motivated by Bloom's disagreement with Paul de Man's deconstructive insistence upon the "priority" of the linguistic to the psychological model (MM, 76). The motives for Bloom's faith in the psychic model can be found in his general attempt to offer his theory of revisionism as an alternative to the tradition of deconstruction which he sees epitomized in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. According to Bloom, deconstruction does not complete the movement of interpretation which restores value to the text after "breaking it apart" (MM, 5-6). He identifies the essence of deconstructive reading with only the second phase of revisionism which he calls "substitution," that is, the exchange of forms and images in one text for those in an earlier. The final phase of [16]

Poetic Destruction revisionism, "representation," is "the antithetical restoration . . . of whatever valid poetry w e have left or m a y yet receive" (MM, 5). This phase gains its ideational priority, its conclusive centrality, in Bloom f r o m his misconception that " T h e r e are no longer any archetypes left to displace" (MM, 31). That genetic and dualistic archetypes dominate Bloom's o w n w o r k certainly undercuts this claim that deconstructive thought is no longer necessary; also, to whatever degree his readings of various poetic texts may "correctly" discover these unquestioned tropes, criticism still has a valid role in demystifying them and allowing what they obscure to be revealed. For example, on this very issue of the preference of revisionism to deconstruction, Bloom's language is structured by the nostalgic myth of the Fall. T o speak of "restoring" value to a text, and of "re-turning" to origins, as well as, in the final phase of revision, "re-presenting" or "re-esteeming" a text is to imply uncritically the possibility of an Unfällen state which exists in what Eliade calls in ilio tempore.6 A critique of Bloom's use of this myth, in the context of the previous discussion of "ends" and "origins" would reveal his desire, his nostalgia, for a nontemporal, non worldly, nonactual presence which would act as "center" for his construction of a practical critical m y t h . This insistence upon the continuity of tradition as protection against chaos is a variant of the defense mechanism in the individual poet. Were this idea of tradition to be deconstructed further, it would become clear that it is also a variant of the myth of the Fall. T h e poet, Satan, expelled f r o m paradise, "falls" into the temporal state, and doing the best with what he has (AI, 33), tries to return to that paradise through his life as a poet. H e reaches for his origin as a poet and fails. But many poets, following the same impossible quest, constitute a tradition which itself becomes a bulwark against the chaos into which man is thrown upon his expulsion f r o m the original paradise. Thus, Bloom insists, the fundamental orientation toward the tradition must be mimetic: [17]

Poetic Destruction do we choose a tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing. You cannot write or teach or think or even read without imitation, and what you imitate is what another person has done, that person's writing or teaching or thinking or reading. Your relation to what informs that person is tradition, for tradition is influence that extends past one generation, a carrying-over of influence. (MM, 32) It is with this a r g u m e n t that w e approach the dark area in B l o o m ' s poetics, b u t a darkness about w h i c h he has obviously t h o u g h t a great deal. H e goes on in this section o f A Map of Misreading, " T h e Dialectics of Poetic T r a d i t i o n , " to define " t r a d i t i o n , " beginning w i t h its e t y m o l o g y , in o r d e r to explain the value of imitation: Tradition, the Latin traditio, is etymologically a handing-over, or a giving-over, a delivery, a giving-up and so even a surrender or a betrayal. Traditio in our sense is Latin only in language; the concept deeply derives from the Hebraic Mishnah, an oral handing-over, or transmission of oral precedents, of what has been found to work, of what has been instructed successfully. (MM, 32) " T r a d i t i o n " in this sense is w h a t is m e a n i n g f u l , p e r m a n e n t , and because continuous, u n c h a n g i n g . It is the poetic " c e n t e r " to w h i c h all writers m u s t return as a source, as a beginning f o r p o etic life. It is a m y t h i c p a r a d i g m . Tradition contains those spiritually valuable events w h i c h must be recollected and it provides a s u b l i m e order of instruction which, ironically, c o m f o r t s the poet b u r d e n e d by the anxiety of his predecessors' achievements. R e lease f r o m the melancholy of influence cannot c o m e a b o u t b y escaping the tradition since n o t h i n g m e a n i n g f u l or creative h a p p e n s except within it. T h e proper stance in the face of the past is recollection of this meaningful order and an a t t e m p t to j o i n it t h r o u g h [18]

Poetic Destruction mimetic "repetition." Complete breaks from the past are not only not a " c u r e , " but they are not possible without sterility. Such discontinuity would mark a second Fall away f r o m retrieved order into a world of futility. In his intricate comparison of criticism and poetic misreading to the Kabbalah and Lurianic interpretation, Bloom advises that we "Remind [ourselves] that Kabbalah literally means 'tradition,' that which has been received" (MM, 31). This identification is important because of the parallel which exists between p o etic/critical interpretation and Kabbalistic misreading, t w o variants of restorative revisionism. Kabbalistic texts and literary texts both interpret the "tradition." This analogy transfers f r o m Kabbalah to literature exactly the kind of centrality, spirituality, constancy, value, and timeless security which I have argued must result from the rhetorical patterns of origin and dualism Bloom uses throughout: "All Kabbalistic texts [for this read literary texts as well] are interpretive . . . and what they interpret is a central text that perpetually possesses authority, priority, and strength, or that indeed can be regarded as text itself" (MM, 4). Tradition becomes a sacred text by means of this identification. It is rediscovered in the return to the origin of the Primal Scene of Instruction, and it is the goal or " e n d " of the revisionary poetic quest. Tradition is a trope, a defense mechanism, not only because it is a center of a world inhabited by those Bloomian poets and critics among us. But moreover, it is the rhetorical center upon which the entire Bloomian critical structure depends in its circular effort to demonstrate the absolute necessity and value of tradition as center. This is the classic example of the vicious circle: critical language turns back u p o n itself, against the author's intent, to reveal its own blindness and unexamined rhetoric. Tradition turns upon itself to reveal, in this case, Bloom's attempt to justify it as a Logos. More critical analyses show that the game is biased by its rhetoric and that B l o o m is " w r o n g " in his arguments for revisionism and imitation as opposed to deconstruction: language must be turned consciously and rhetorically against itself to see [19]

Poetic Destruction w h a t "results" its figures have predetermined, to u n d e r s t a n d w h a t meaning or value they h a v e excluded because of their u n e x amined, habitual, and privileged status. At the same time that B l o o m ' s rhetoric argues f o r and against the logocentricity of " t r a d i t i o n , " he tries to maintain an anthropocentric universe for p o e t r y . 9 H e argues against de M a n ' s and Derrida's valuation of w r i t i n g as prior to oral language, n o t only because such an idea w o u l d " d e - c e n t e r " the tradition as Kabbalah, b u t also because it m o v e s m a n himself o u t f r o m the center of creation: T h e first use then of a Scene of Instruction is t o remind us of the humanistic loss we sustain if we yield up the authority of oral tradition to partisans of writing [Derrida's "l'écriture"], to those like Derrida and Foucault who imply for all language what Goethe erroneously asserted for Homer's language, that language by itself writes the poems and thinks. The human writes, the human thinks, and always following after and defending against another human, however fantasized that human becomes in the strong imaginings of those who arrive late upon the scene. (MM, 60) B e y o n d the nostalgic idea of " l o s s " which emerges f r o m the m y t h of the Fall and generally f r o m the rhetorics of b o t h genetics and dualism, this text, like those others on tradition, crucially establishes B l o o m ' s need for a center, for something which cannot be b r o u g h t into d o u b t , which m u s t be kept out of play. B l o o m defends the primacy of t w o crucial religious centers—the divine text, a source of inspiration, and the reason for that divine m e s sage, m a n — f r o m the d e m y t h o l o g i z i n g and deconstruction w h i c h w o u l d destroy the self and the logos as privileged, safe positions. B l o o m attacks M o d e r n and P o s t m o d e r n writers, especially T h o m a s P y n c h o n , for m a r k i n g the death of poetry because they threaten n o t only his centers, but the very idea of center. P y n c h o n ' s sacrilegious relation t o the tradition n o t only makes B l o o m anxious, but reveals the basic limitations of his theories on the relation of writers to the past: [20]

Poetic Destruction For us creative emulation of literary tradition leads to images of inversion, incest, sado-masochistic parody, of which the great, gloriously self-defeating master is Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow is a perfect text for the sixties, Age of Frye and Borges, but already deliberately belated for the seventies. (MM, 31) B l o o m ' s genetic rhetoric brings h i m to the necessary " c o n c l u sion": a tradition w h i c h has a beginning, and develops, m u s t also h a v e an end. W h e n Gravity's Rainbow and, one m i g h t add, V, as well as the w o r k s o f Beckett, are seen as emulators of a great tradition, they m u s t appear as decadent texts, as evidence of a fatal decline. T h e p r o b l e m is that B l o o m presumes a stable intention a m o n g all writers which does n o t allow t h e m to find a creative relation to the past w h i c h is n o t mimetic or anxious. M o r e accurately, his rhetoric does n o t let h i m discover any other possible relation because it restricts meaning to the genetic-mimetic p a r a d i g m . C o n t i n u i n g in this dualistic rhetoric B l o o m arrives at an intolerable d i l e m m a as critic and teacher in the age of P y n chon: If [the teacher of literature] evades his burden [to teach the presentness of the past] by attempting to teach only the supposed presence of the present, he will find himself teaching only some simplistic, partial reduction that wholly obliterates the present in the name of one or another historicizing formula, or past injustice, or dead faith, whether secular or not. Yet how is he to teach a tradition now grown so wealthy and so heavy that to accommodate it demands more strength than any single consciousness can provide, short of the parodistic Kabbalism of a Pynchon? (MM, 39) T h e alternatives, then, are t o a c c o m m o d a t e oneself to the tradition as a w h o l e or to " d i e " imaginatively as in P y n c h o n ' s parodistic sacrilege of the tradition. B l o o m ' s dualistic rhetoric will not a d m i t any third possibility. His need for a center, f o r o n t o logical security, cannot conceive the living in a p r o d u c t i v e b u t u n a c c o m m o d a t e d relationship with the past. It cannot imagine [211

Poetic Destruction that the tradition no longer " w o r k s , " that it no longer is mishnah. O f course, I cannot attempt to deal with Pynchon here, although I think it is clear f r o m his novels that for him the past no longer contains successful instruction. The same impulse which Bloom dismisses in deconstruction, i.e., the démystification of archetypes, of the logos, is behind much of his art. Also, in a way which foreshadows what I will argue about Heidegger, I would extend the destructive impulse to a "retrieve," as I believe Pynchon and other Modern and Postmodern writers do, of what is obscured by the hardening of the tradition into habit. N o t only does B l o o m ' s commitment to the unquestioned rhetoric of genetics and dualism and total faith in the necessity of the tradition as logos blind him to possible, nonfunereal ways of reading the relation of M o d e r n and Postmodern writers to the tradition, but his o w n w o r k "proves" the invalidity of the "revisionary" approach and of the genetic and dualistic grammars. His texts show that all uncritical uses of traditional language are sterile and self-defeating. Like Bate, therefore, he has proven what he set out, in opposition to Nietzsche, Derrida, and de Man, to disprove. T h e anxiety of influence is necessarily a linguistic structure because the unexamined pressures of what Heidegger calls the ontotheological and Derrida the logocentric language of tradition bring him to demonstrate, unwittingly, the fact that to some extent, it is language which thinks, reads, and writes. It would seem that Bloom's later writings, especially Poetry and Repression and Wallace Stevens would make it difficult for m e to defend my view of Bloom as a somewhat mystified victim of his o w n original key ideas of anxiety, genealogy, and family romance. The almost endless play of substitution of signs, of metaphors for reading, in the Bloomian apparatus suggests that Bloom recognizes the metaphoricity of all language while at the same time his self-confessed Gnostic dualism seems to d o away with all privileged origins by suggesting that "at the beginning" there is always difference and violence. Moreover, Bloom's studies in revisionism and his full-length analysis of Stevens' 122]

Poetic Destruction poetry have so demystified the notion of influence as an innocent and neutral transference of strength and tradition that to accuse him of being a conservative defender of the central pattern of Modernist critical action is apparently absurd. Yet I would suggest that not only are all of these claims defensible, but that it is indeed possible to find in Bloom's work the major contemporary continuation of the ironic, aesthetic vision classically located in the N e w Criticism. I argue in my third chapter that for the N e w Critics poetry is essentially a defensive troping against time, pursuing critical power as a means to absolute freedom. Of course, there are important differences in technique and vision between Bloom and Cleanth Brooks, w h o m I take to be paradigmatic of N e w Criticism. For Bloom, a text is a dialectical interplay of rhetorical surface and psychological depth, of trope and intention, of ethos and pathos, while for Brooks a text is only a surface of analogical intersections weaving a tapestry of meaning. And, of course, the N e w Critics stand rigorously opposed to all notions of intention as a critical fallacy. Nonetheless, one could argue that the N e w Critics' explications do indeed frequently raise psychological figures to understand the continuous play of tropes in a text. But even so, the important parallel between Bloom and the N e w Critics is not to be located here but on a more abstract level in a consideration of their analogous desires to create machines or models or metaphors for reading which trope against time by playfully substituting a variety of figures within a well-controlled, unquestioned, powerful theoretical and practical critical apparatus. In fact, one can go even further and assert that, as I show in my chapter on Brooks, this freeplay within fixed boundaries, which represents an aspiration to power conceived as "absolute freed o m , " reveals itself as a subjective projection which ends in a critical self-parody revealing the deathly stillness of ironic play. Bloom and the N e w Critics are alike in this. For even though the N e w Critics notoriously refuse to elaborate a systematic procedure for criticism, their rhetoric and their operations upon texts create, defacto, a powerful set of communicable [23]

Poetic Destruction terms, concepts, and procedures which effectively constitute a method o f reading. While Bloom has the apparent advantage of generating out of himself a seemingly endless number of signs and concepts for his revisionist idea of reading the shifts within and between texts—indeed, at times it seems as if he is capable of substituting entire systems of tropes for each other—it is clear that, in their variety, they are anchored in the one central utterance of Bloom's critical will—the recognition, projection, and elaboration of the figure o f "anxiety of influence." Many of Bloom's elaborations are, admittedly, significant developments in his and our theory of poetry. Yet, despite the enlargement and refinement these developments bring about, and despite their utility, they do not ever put into question the authority of the central enabling device o f the Bloomian juggernaut. Bloom's work shows that the "anxiety of influence" is a powerful mechanism for unlocking the mysteries of post-enlightenment poetry and criticism. But as powerful and at times persuasive as it is, especially in providing some of the most subtle readings of texts, it is not demonstrative, and cannot be. O f course, Bloom acknowledges that all reading is misreading and he exemplifies this by revising his own misprision of the figure of "misprision" (WS, 394). This sort of destabilizing play, coupled with Bloom's recognition o f the omnipresence of tropes and the absence o f proper meaning, allows for a theoretical defense of Bloom's machine: poetry is an infinite process of willed lies troping defensively upon other tropes, disrupted within by the discontinuous relationships between the ratios of the psyche or the topoi of the tradition. Meaning emerges from the also willed healing act of the dance o f the poet's intention. Criticism must be able to reproduce, indeed, endlessly to discover this dance not only to reveal it in a twisted confrontation with or misprision of each poem but also to provide a student-reader with an apparatus which will enable him or her to see the hitherto-invisible movement of tropes. The apparatus resulting from free substitution [24]

Poetic D e s t r u c t i o n . effectively prevents the deconstructive m o v e m e n t i n t o the aporia; m e a n i n g is restored to criticism and p o e t r y . B l o o m gives a m o r e eloquent version o f his vision: The function of criticism at the present time, as I conceive it, is to find a middle way between the paths of démystification of meaning, and of recollection or restoration of meaning, or between limitation and representation. But the only aesthetic path between limitation and representation is substitution, and so all that criticism can hope to teach, whether to the common reader or to the poet, is a series of stronger modes of substitution. Substitution, in this sense, is a mode of creation-throughcatastrophe. The vessels or fixed forms break in every act of reading or of writing, but how they break is to a considerable extent in the power of each reader and of each writer. Yet there are patterns in the breaking that resist the power, however strong, of any reader and of every writer. These patterns —evident as sequences of images, or of tropes, or of psychic defenses—are as definite as those of any dance, and as varied as there are various dances. But poets do not invent the dances they dance, and we can tell the dancer from the dance. The stronger poet not only performs the dance more skillfully than the weaker poet, but he modifies it as well, and yet it does remain the same dance. I am afraid that there does tend to be one fairly definite dance pattern in post-Enlightenment poetry, which can be altered by strong substitution, but still it does remain the same dance. (PR, 270) This is an i m p o r t a n t m o m e n t in B l o o m . Its echoes o f Eliot, Yeats, and the N e w Critics as well as its o b v i o u s a t t e m p t to m a r k B l o o m o f f f r o m the d e c o n s t r u c t o r s and their concern with the cognitive ethos of p o e t r y — t h e s e echoes place B l o o m ' s criticism in a field o f competitors f o r critical a u t h o r i t y and p r o m i nence. H i s insistence u p o n the inevitability of certain patterns to the poetic breaking of misprision is a curious a d o p t i o n and inversion of a N e w Critical principle w h i c h asserts that there are certain irreducible figures in the carpet of a p o e m resistant to the acid-bath of the m o s t p o w e r f u l critics' desires. As I suggest in [25]

Poetic Destruction m y third chapter, for the N e w Critic there is a recognizable, repeated pattern of ironic, analogic structuring in poetry producing an allegory of the poem's fullness which, paradoxically, emerges, as in The Waste Land, f r o m its o w n constant assertion of emptiness. In a way which is typical of M o d e r n criticism, and perhaps of all the h u m a n sciences, we see that the patterning of the poem or of the poetic "tradition" which assures their fullness is the result of the interpretive p o w e r of the privileged critical terms of the reading project itself—no matter whether that project is canonical or revisionist. In other words, the semiotic value of the p o e m — o r tradition or inter-poem—is a product of the syntax and g r a m m a r of the critical method, of the enabling figure and its emanations. It is only the greatest irony that the insistence by the critic—Bloom, Brooks, Bate—that there is an irreducible poetic residue or structure beyond the reach of either the poet's or the critic's revisionist will is itself an assertion, in reality, of the p o w e r and authority of that critic's misprision as it is theoretically and practically elaborated. In other words, while Bloom claims to have discovered the essential choreography of the post-Enlightenment p o e m and, correspondingly, the inadequacy of N e w Critical and deconstructive projects t o that choreography, I claim that at this very m o m e n t he stares most directly into a mirror and sees his o w n reflection. This is not to accuse B l o o m of narcissism or solipsism. Although I do want to suggest an alignment between the way he sees himself everywhere he turns within the canon and the similar N e w Critical process of projection which reduces all poetry to irony and paradox, I also w a n t to make clear that Bloom's self-reflection in projection is only a being-true to his Gnostic heritage. I would like to transfer Bloom's comment about poets to critics (whenever Bloom talks generally about poets and poetry he is usually talking about himself, and since he is so powerful, he is, more importantly, talking about almost all m o d e r n critics): " B u t poets d o not invent the dances they dance, and w e can tell the dancer f r o m the dance." T h e dance modern critics seem tc [26]

Poetic Destruction repeat has to d o with stepping along from an initial strong perception—which is often only a fearful vision of the self and its place in time—through a combative elaboration extending the insight to other poems and absorbing other critics, to self-parodic echoes of the original insight as its schematic outline becomes clear and often predictable—when, to put it another way, the machinelike nature of the critical operation becomes evident in its worst senses. When individual strong critics pass through each phase is hard to determine and varies with the strength of the one w h o reads them. But one thing seems certain: at moments when the critic's authority allows him to claim the truth of his perception as the excuse for his method—when, that is to say, he so powerfully projects his o w n method's syntax and grammar u p o n poetry and thinks he has not—at that moment when he no longer recognizes the shadow of his own desire and does not k n o w that the method has become his master, then, certainly, the deathly limitation of literary criticism as a Gnostic preoccupation with subjectivity becomes apparent. It is important to remember that despite Bloom's claims for the universality of troping, substitution, and misprision, and despite his frequent explicit application of these weapons to the stability of his own project, his critical project is not dissolved. Rather, it grows in strength by becoming a more massive and powerful archive of readings, metaphors, and absorptions. Even these aphoristic plays on his o w n terms—such as revising his n o tion of misprision—all carry the voiceprint of " B l o o m , " of an unavoidable power or presence in so many fields of literary scholarship. Indeed, one comes to expect these playful moves f r o m " B l o o m , " and while they are often dazzling, exorbitant, or outlandish they are not really surprising. For example, in "Coda: Poetic Crossing," Bloom makes a daring attempt to recoup a repositioned logos: Theology and a system of tropes are an ethos; belief and persuasion are a pathos. The logos of meaning is generated either by the repressive passage (representation) from ethos to pathos or [27]

Poetic Destruction by the sublimating passage (limitation) from pathos to ethos. The dynamism of the substituting process is the logos, which tells us that meaning in a poem is itself liminal, transgressive, a breaking as much as a making. (f^S, 401) This figure appears t o w a r d the end of a p r o g r a m m a t i c passage defending against Paul de M a n ' s notion of rhetoric: "Just h e r e , " B l o o m writes, " t h o u g h it is rather late to be attempting f u n d a mental definitions, I a m compelled to explain the vision of rhetoric that m y enterprise has taken as a starting p o i n t " (WS, 393). T h e compulsion to explain forces B l o o m to an overt figuration of his original critical desire, the restoration of the logos: the multitude of previous Freudian, romantic, Kabbalistic, Emersonian, etc. figures which position B l o o m between recuperative, humanistic criticism and the deconstructors' preoccupation with demystifying ethos—all of these figures have yielded to their c o m m o n metaphysical ancestor, the figure of logos itself. While B l o o m has admittedly m o v e d the logos away f r o m a n o tion of full presence outside play into a new " d y n a m i s m " of troping, he has d o n e so only by repositioning it in a discursive space opened-up by his o w n earlier critical w o r k and that of his competitors in advanced criticism. This space between recuperative h u m a n i s m and deconstructive démystification becomes visible in his a n n o u n c e m e n t that " T h e function of criticism . . . is to find a m i d d l e way between the paths of démystification of meaning, and of recollection or restoration of meaning . . . " (PR, 270). It is the ambition and p o w e r of B l o o m ' s repositioning of the logos which makes his dance interesting. H e does this sort of thing better than others w h o follow after or w h o compete with him. H e leaps higher, whirls m o r e rapidly, and always maintains proper f o r m . His dance can be conceived either as an o n g o i n g Baroque encrustation or as a Ballanchine-like reduction to line, speed, and purity; one need only choose to read him globally or locally. But, m o r e importantly, one must recognize that the [28]

Poetic Destruction dance always remains the same because the original ground, the initial act of perception which announces Bloom as a "strong critic," the idea of the "anxiety of influence," is never and can never be questioned. It always remains out-of-play as the law of gravity which makes possible the moves straining against their own enabling condition. While there is no doubt about the achievement emerging from and defending this first idea, there should be some doubt if the constant need to reimagine the first idea, while always being careful not to displace it, has not finally brought Bloom to a position of poverty, to the melancholy halls of a parodie prominence purchased at the cost of his own strength. Bloom is perhaps the most brilliant critic the American academy has produced in this century and certainly worthy of a more sustained, detailed, and dialectical study than I can provide here, within the hermeneutical restrictions of my project. I have dealt with Bloom's major writings—and will return to them in later chapters—because of the power and authority of his position, which always requires that one must differentiate oneself from him on these matters. Since I would like to indicate that Modern American poetry can benefit from a reading which attends to its openness to time and history, I have tried to suggest why the New Critical and Bloomian conceptions of poetry as a lie against time result from the limitations, needs, and glories of their critical stances. Bloom prefers the Valentinian speculation to the Heideggerean as a metaphor for poetic theory because he accepts "the Valentinian misprision condemning time as a lie" (PR, 12-13). As I have already suggested, Bloom, like Bate and the New Critics, develops a series of metaphors to stabilize "tradition" as a defense against time. In fact, this stabilization results in the gamble of projecting one's own strength in this series of figures against the perceived threat of time. I hope to suggest that accepting the Heideggerean metaphor for truth as aletheia provides a temporal poetics and historical sense of tradition. Moreover, the critical act no longer conceives its own interests to lie in troping against time, but in accepting the histori[29]

Poetic Destruction cal nature of hermeneutics and the comparative powerlessness of critical secondariness. The Heideggerean metaphor allows for an "optimistic" conception of history free of the defensive anxiety against impending death. Moreover, Heidegger's development of aletheia provides a space for "truth" in poetics which even Bloom's revisionism does not: "Kaballah, as a Gnosis, starts with the rival assumption, which is that all distinction between proper and figurative meaning in language has been totally lost since the catastrophe of creation" (H^S, 394). In line with this Vichian insight, Bloom substitutes the problem of meaning for the question of " t r u t h . " This is a substitution which all Modern fetishists of language have made. For Heidegger, "truth," gained in a destructive phenomenological hermeneutics, exists beyond the restrictions of the linguistically determined inside-outside metaphor implied by the dualistic Gnostic concern with subjectivity (PR, 11). And, a correlate of this Gnosticism is Bloom's insistence upon the priority of the will in poetics, a priority so certain that, for Bloom, both the tropes of action and desire on the one hand and the distinctions between them on the other are all themselves tropes of the will (WS, 393). For Bloom, the will is dominant because he understands that in the internalized Gnostic world of romantic poetry which he describes, cognition must be a secondary function: "Where the will predominates, even in its own despite, how much is there left to know?" (IVS, 387). But phenomenological hermeneutics destroys the assumptions of the internalized quest romance (and its critical equivalent, the endless quest for new metaphors for reading [Pi?, 14]) and reintroduces the cognitive aspects of a "World"-oriented, temporal poetry and criticism. This means, in effect, that the critical and poetic will, what Bloom calls a "stance" (PR, 1; WS, 11, 395ff), although essential in breaking down the inherited lies which separate time and poetry, are restricted in their self-loving (and perhaps self-destroying) freeplay by the generosity of a phenomenological hermeneutics concerned with "truth," not the authority of subjectivity and will. [30]

Poetic Destruction Perhaps most importantly, I would like to suggest that for those poets I discuss in this volume, and for others like William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, and Gary Snyder, the anxiety of influence is not an adequate trope for their poems' temporality and historicity. In what I take to be one of those thematically revealing but reductive moments of selfparody endemic to all strong critics, Bloom writes: I find useful enough Paul Ricoeur's summary of primal repression, as meaning "that we are always in the mediate, in the already expressed, the already said," for this is the traumatic predicament that results in what I have termed "the anxiety of influence," the awareness that what might be called, analogically, the infantile needs of the beginning imagination had to be met by the primal fixation of a Scene of Instruction. (PR, 232) Without reprocessing my objections to Bloom's genealogical metaphors or reasserting my sense of the sameness of his project, I want to offer for consideration the idea that certain strong poets exist in the mediate without experiencing the trauma he describes. Or rather, their response to the "trauma" is not a defensive lie against time, a mastering of anxiety by an act of the deceitful will, but an open and projective poetry. These poets, like Whitman, reside openly in the mediate, look toward the future, and are open to the weight of the past. But these poets prospect in the past, hoping to renew the future out of the past. They do not unwillingly extend the decayed and decaying dance of the revisionist to the death of poetry itself.

Ill Paul de Man's speculations about the relationship of literature to literary history are negatively useful. His deconstructions of the traditional genetic forms of history—positivistic, organic, and dialectical—set in bold relief the absolute need for a more adequate theory of literary history and its interaction with the prac[31]

Poetic Destruction tice of literary interpretation than those I have already discussed. Essentially, my treatment of de Man has two parts: first, I will follow through his deconstructions of traditional forms of history which show their inadequacy to the complexities of literary language; second, de Man's own simplifying blindness, that is, his claim that all poetic language is already demystified and not in need of destruction, emerges as an unexamined presupposition which some of his own rather oblique statements on the interrelationship of poetic texts actually calls into doubt. In other words, I intend to follow de Man's work to the point where it suggests the need for a theory which goes beyond what he himself claims is literary history, a succession of critical misreadings, into the region where poems themselves begin to appear as interpretations, as misreadings, of other poems. It is precisely out of this ongoing process of poetic misreading that a fuller literary history can emerge. There are two strategies in de Man's work which are of interest here. By examining the structure of blindness-insight which appears in all the critical texts he treats, de Man reveals that literary language and literary texts are inimicable to extrinsic or objective theories of language and criticism: A literary text is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind. It leads to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge but merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligibility in its own terms. This area of immanence is necessarily part of all critical discourse. (BI, 107) The nonscientific status of the literary "event," the "text," prevents the application of any pseudoscientific or extrinsic models of criticism. Furthermore, the required immanental or intrinsic nature of interpretation—that is, the fact that a text needs interpretation, needs to be engaged hermeneutically and not merely described "scientifically"—makes all traditional forms of literary history inadequate because they themselves rest upon a concep[32]

Poetic Destruction tion of literary language which mistakes a "text" for an object existing independently "out-there" in space and time and amenable, like a rock, to objective "explanation." Until the point where I depart from de Man by deconstructing his own blind claim for an absolutely demystified literary or poetic language, his complex deconstructions of naive theories for reading and historicizing poetic texts move my own argument for a fuller literary interpretation and literary history toward its own statement drawn from the hermeneutic destruction (Destruktion) performed by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. The programmatic use which I make of de Man often results in a blurring of point of view in the next section of this essay. Necessarily my attempt to think hermeneutically through these deconstructions with de Man requires the identification of our view-points, until his own blindness becomes the "subject" of the deconstructive process and compells me to abandon the immanental identity. Traditional forms of literary history—this includes Bloom as well as Bate—rest on an unexamined language of continuity, privilege, and nonliterary models. De Man's deconstructions of critical texts throw all of these into doubt. Because critics are self-conscious readers, their texts reveal the problems of reading—which necessarily means interpreting—a text (ΒI, viii). These "problems" emerge from the essential nature of all literary language, according to de Man, and show why literature is contrary, fundamentally, to the rhetorical presuppositions upon which standard histories of literature rest. Since I have already suggested some of the fallacies inherent in the language of continuity and privilege in my discussion of Bloom and Bate, I will begin here with de Man's deconstruction of the idea that literary criticism, and therefore literary history, can be based upon a nonliterary or extrinsic model. This deconstruction leads him to his attack on the genetic model—the basis of continuity—and the possibility of privilege itself. Scientific or extrinsic models for literary criticism begin, according to de Man, from a naive understanding of the act of reading. When Tsvetan Todorov calls for a structuralist system [33]

Poetic Destruction to deal with the literariness of a text, he mistakenly assumes that a text can be analytically treated as a phenomenon and described in and of itself. 10 "The problem," however, "has not always been correctly perceived, partly because the model for the act of interpretation is being constantly oversimplified" (Β1, 107). Todorov objects to all "immanental" methods of interpretation, i.e., to all hermeneutic processes, because a "description" carried out in such a way "would make the description into a mere word-for-word repetition of the work itself . . .' " (Bl, 108). The fallacy of his argument, as de Man quite rightly perceives, is that in the criticism of a text, which is an intentional event, not a sensual object occupying space, there can be no strict, scientific description. Rather, the text can only be understood—again Heidegger is relevant here—and thus criticism can only rightly be called a description of this act of understanding. 11 Criticism is a hermeneutic, an interpretation. It is indeed legitimately a "repetition," a temporal process, akin to the hermeneutic circle, involved in the temporal process of understanding. The interpretation, the new text, cannot, therefore, be itself an object of description, but only a heuristic phenomenon which can trigger further interpretation and attempts at understanding. The scientific or, in this case, the structuralist model, is bothered by the indefiniteness of the act of interpretation, which cannot be made into an "exact science." Todorov objects that no interpretation is faithful to or leaves unchanged the original text: 'From the moment there is writing and no longer mere reading, the critic is saying something that the work he studies does not say, even if he claims to be saying the same thing' " {Bl, 109), De Man, after agreeing with Todorov about the messiness of this situation, purposely compounds the problem: "not only does the critic say something that the work does not say, but he even says something that he himself does not mean to say" (Bl, 109). Because interpretation is a function of the temporal structure of understanding, it possesses no "epistemological certainty." (Bl, 109) The result of this structure of interpretation, of course, is that unlike the form of scientific description, the "ob[34]

Poetic Destruction ject" under investigation, the literary text, does not function, and cannot be made to function, as a privileged center for critical discourse. It cannot be pinned down, confined, and contained; it cannot be reified. Furthermore, the critic cannot count on his own privileged position to provide stability. Since his discourse cannot originate f r o m an extrinsic system or model, his language itself must be, f r o m the beginning, part of the " g a m e . " 1 2 It cannot, or certainly should not, attempt to violate the essentially linguistic structure it possesses by reducing it to a stable and reified object. The critic must willingly enter into a relationship which is marked by flux. As de Man points out, in such criticism the text and the interpretation threaten to destroy each other. In fact, Todorov recognizes the potential risk to verbal and critical stability in this interpretive process. It is for him, however, only another reason to try to escape its uncertainty: The work can be used repeatedly to show where and how the critic diverged from it, but in the process of showing this our understanding of the work is modified and the faulty vision shown to be productive. . . . Both texts can even enter into conflict with each other. And one could say that the further the critical text penetrates in its understanding, the more violent the conflict becomes, to the point of mutual destruction: Todorov significantly has to have recourse to an imagery of death and violence in order to describe the encounter between text and commentary. One could even go further still and see the murder become suicide as the critic, in his blindness, turns the weapon of his language upon himself, in his mistaken belief that it is aimed at another. (BI, 109-10) De Man's deconstruction of Todorov's extrinsic, scientific, structuralist criticism not only points out a difference 13 in every act of interpretation between the text and the criticism, but also the irremediable breach between all centered forms of discourse and the language of literature and criticism. Those who attempt to produce such logocentric criticism as the structuralists strive for proceed from and remain in error. It is an attempt to escape the risk of interpretation in which the critic engages the text with a (35]

Poetic Destruction full awareness of the implications of reading and writing: "The necessary immanence of the reading in relation to the text is a burden from which there can be no escape. It is bound to stand out as the irreducible philosophical problem raised by all forms of literary criticism, however pragmatic they may seem or want to be. We encounter it here in the f o r m of a constitutive discrepancy, in critical discourse, between the blindness of the statement and the insight of the meaning" (Β1, 110). Thus, there is a radical discontinuity (or differance), between the literary text and any reading of it, naive or critical. N o extrinsic system can be imported into the gap to close it. There is no privileged point of origin to be found in the encounter between self and text. Reading is at best ambivalent because of the nature of the act. Criticism, in trying to render the immediate or immanental experience, is caught in the paradox of the mediate nature of language. It is de Man's object to make critics aware of the duplicity of their language and of the ambivalence of their act. This also offers one way of approaching de Man's attack on the idea of genetic continuity. The path from the divergence of reading and text to the discontinuity of literary interrelations, and therefore, to the impossibility of all continuous, i.e., genetic, literary history is clearly marked. As we have seen in Bloom and Bate, genetic models of literary history, whether they are centered on organicism or causality, result in the idea of a continuous tradition. In Bloom's case, this continuity is assured by his theory of imitation. Essentially, the genetic structure is a nonlinguistic rhetoric based on the literal structure of life, but which can be applied to literature only metaphorically (GGN, 44). It has many variants within itself, however, and perhaps the most familiar one to literary historians is that of the neady contained "narrative unit" (GGN, 44). In all such traditional literary histories, according to de Man, "history and interpretation coincide, the common principle that mediates them being the genetic concept of totalization" (GGN, 45). Totalization occurs in this structure whether it takes the form of a line or the dialectic. In the former, " 'all things below' [36]

Poetic Destruction are said to be part of a chain of being heading t o w a r d its teleological end. T h e hierarchical w o r l d o f Ideas and Images b e c o m e s a w o r l d of m e a n s m o v i n g t o w a r d an end and o r d e r e d in the p r o s pective temporality o f a genetic m o v e m e n t " ( G G N , 44). T h i s linear f o r m becomes, in the R o m a n t i c period, at least according to the general understanding ( G G N , 44), the dialectical process o f evolving Spirit w h i c h climaxes in H e g e l ' s Logic a n d Phenomenology. As de M a n points out: "Das Resultat," says Hegel, "ist nur darum dasselbe, was der Anfang, weil der Anfang Zweck ist" (sic) (Phenomenology of the Mind, Introduction). The English translation of the words italicized by Hegel illustrates the interdependence and potential identity of end and beginning that characterizes a genetic concept of time: "The outcome is the same as the beginning only because the beginning is an end." (GGN, 44) T h e dialectic then does n o t escape the genetic m o d e l . A l t h o u g h a s t u d y of R o m a n t i c i s m m i g h t s h o w that the dialectic replaces the linear f o r m of time, it w o u l d also s h o w " t h a t a dialectical c o n ception of time and history can very well be genetic and that the a b a n d o n m e n t of an organic analogism b y n o m e a n s implies t h e a b a n d o n m e n t of a genetic p a t t e r n " ( G G N , 45). A l t h o u g h t h e dialectic, " d e c o n s t r u c t i n g " the linear or organic m e t a p h o r , does create "discontinuities" t o the extent that n o event or g r o u p of events can acquire full historical m e a n i n g , each event "can still b e said to share in the experience o f this m o v e m e n t [to totalizat i o n ] " ( G G N , 45). In the dialectic, t h e closed circular f o r m of t h e system or of the a r g u m e n t ' s structure b e c o m e s t h e m o d e l of t h e genetic, teleological pattern. Linearity is disposed w i t h and replaced by the " u l t i m a t e c o n f o r m i t y of the end t o the o r i g i n " ( G G N , 45). T h u s , there is no radical break or r u p t u r e in t h e genetic pattern, even in its dialectical manifestations. In the dialectic, the antitheses are resolved in synthesis, and all parts p r o g ress t o w a r d a totalization f o r m e d b y a circle in w h i c h the end returns to t h e beginning thereby only changing t h e shape of the continuity. F u r t h e r m o r e , only deconstruction can reveal that the 137)

Poetic Destruction dialectic is blindly founded on the same ideals as the scientific, linear model: From a historiographical point of view, it is instructive to see a genetic narrative [The Birth of Tragedy ] function as a step leading to insights that destroy the claims upon which the genetic continuity was founded, but that could not have been formulated if the fallacy had not been allowed to unfold. (GGN, 53)

When the deconstructive process is applied to traditional genetic assumptions of literary history, the centers o f the various discourses are displaced from their privileged positions. Nietzsche, according to de Man, breaks open the tradition and allows what is obscured by it to appear. In the last two essays o f Blindness and Insight, de Man continues his reconsideration of the standard forms o f literary history by exposing radical discontinuities between texts and within individual works. In both essays, the previously assured center of historical discourse is displaced by an equiprimordial and simulaneous binary opposition. I intend to discuss the first of these essays to show how de Man moves through the conflict between traditional literary history and what deconstruction reveals about literary language to call for a more satisfactory literary history which, as de Man puts it, is the same as literary interpretation, but not identical to it. "Literary History and Literary Modernity" begins by throwing the ordinary understanding of "modern" into doubt and by suggesting that the "beginning" of this very essay is potentially absurd. The entire opening paragraph must be quoted for de Man's detailed rhetoric to function clearly: T o write reflectively about modernity leads to problems that put the usefullness of the term into question, especially as it applies, or fails to apply, to literature. There may well be an inherent contradiction between modernity, which is a way of acting and behaving, and such terms as "reflection" or "ideas" that play an important part in literature and history. The spontaneity of being modern conflicts with the claim to think and [38]

Poetic Destruction write about modernity; it is not at all certain that literature and modernity are in any way compatible concepts. Yet we all speak readily about Modern literature and even use this term as a device for historical periodization, with the same apparent unawareness that history and modernity may well be even more incompatible than literature and modernity. The innocuous-sounding title of this essay may therefore contain no less than two logical absurdities—a most inauspicious beginning. GΒ1, 143)

D e Man concludes f r o m all this that the modern and the historical are t w o synchronic, necessary functions at the "center" of the act of literature. Within a given text there is a movement or structure which attempts to detach that w o r k f r o m any vestigial relationship with the past, but which simultaneously, using the language of that past, records that act and desire. Furthermore, the relation of "present" works to the tradition is not at all continuous. T h e initial impulse of being " m o d e r n " is, as Nietzsche understood, "the ability to forget whatever precedes a present situation" (BI, 146); Nietzschean man must forget everything in order to be able to d o something (BI, 147): "Modernity exists in the f o r m of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. . . . Thus defined, modernity and history are diametrically opposed to each other" (BI, 148). D e Man's deconstruction has not yet brought the diametric opposition of modernity and history to the point where they are to be seen as t w o irreconcilable but absolutely necessary and simultaneous " f o c i " of a structure. 1 4 But de Man's examination of Nietzsche's shrill and extravagant rhetoric shows that it indirectly reveals the structure of differance in which history and modernity are not only opposed but synchronic. From the start of every act of creation, even in attacks upon the historical mind itself, they are co-original and equivalued: From the start [of "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben"], the intoxication with the history-transcending life-process is counterbalanced by a deeply pessimistic wisdom [39]

Poetic Destruction that remains rooted in the sense of historical causality, although it reverses the movement of history from one of development to one of regression. . . . This description of life as a constant regression . . . is a temporal experience of human mutability, historical in the deepest sense of the term in that it implies the necessary experience of any present as a passing experience that makes the past irrevocable and unforgettable. (BI, 148) T h e irreducible opposition which de M a n allows to emerge in Nietzsche's text between history and modernity becomes even m o r e unescapable when the problem is transferred to the act of literature. D e Man says that " t h e modernity of literature confronts us at all times with an unsolvable paradox" (BI, 151). Literature begins as a spontaneous, free act which has n o past and is discontinuous f r o m all which precedes it (BI, 151-52). " B u t the writer's language is to some degree the product of his o w n action; h e is both the historian and agent of his o w n language" (BI, 152). Literature is, then, inherently based on a difference: the act and the "interpretation" of that act which remains always only mediate. Although chroniclers of literary history assert the possibility of modernity as forgetful originality, de M a n claims that their rhetoric often entraps them into saying the opposite of w h a t they mean and, therefore, into putting the possibility of such m o d e r nity into question. Yet, the impulse to modernity is never overcome or synthesized; it is never aufgehoben: " M o d e r n i t y turns out to be indeed one of the concepts by which the distinctive nature of literature can be revealed in all its intricacy" (BI, 161). It cannot, however, be given any priority in the definition of literature. " M o d e r n " brings with it "history"; neither can exist alone: " T h e more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past" (BI, 161). This is the u n e n d ing and absurd paradox which defines all literature and which cannot be avoided by literary interpretations or literary history. D e Man's basic concern throughout this essay is the possibility of writing a history of literature which is marked by an (40]

Poetic Destruction awareness of such differance at the "heart" of literature. Positivistic and ahistorical modes o f literary history are of no value since they misinterpret the nature of literary language and are absolutely inimical to it. Organic and dialectical histories assert the possibility of privilege and are different from the nature of literature. Since the structure of modernity-history is not genetic, "It follows that it would be a mistake to think of literary history as a diachronic narrative of the fluctuating motion we have tried to describe. Such a narrative can only be metaphorical, and history is not fiction" ( B l , 163). T h e opposition between literature and history is absolute as long as historical language assumes any privileged rhetoric. The only history appropriate to literature must itself be marked by discontinuity. As a result, de Man calls for a displacement of the center of the rhetorics o f all history. However, in perhaps his most valuable insight, he concludes that the task is not as monumental as it first seems because "what we call literary interpretation . . . is in fact literary history" (Bl, 165). This rather enigmatic but, I think, comprehensible remark can be amplified by examining the exchange between de Man, Louis Roberts, and Walter Kaufmann following de Man's paper, "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric." In response, at first to R o b erts, de Man emphasizes the importance of reading: I am very glad that you bring us back to the question of how Nietzsche is to be read. Perhaps we have not yet begun to read him properly. In the case of major authors this is never a simple task. There are likely to be long periods of continual misinterpretation. . . . Certain authors are privileged in provoking more and better misreadings than others, Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche being three striking cases in point. Every interpretation can be said in Nietzsche's terms to be both truth and lie, and this double aspect can best be understood with regard to the complex relationship between literal and figurai meaning within the linguistic sign. Nietzsche uses at least two terms for "misreading": one is "Will to power" and the other is simply "interpretation." Both combine in the forceful reading that [41]

Poetic D e s t r u c t i o n presents itself as absolutely true but can then, in its turn, be undermined. (NTR, 49-50) Interpretations are, then, misreadings. T h e y d o n o t and cannot " p r o g r e s s " linearly or dialectically t o w a r d enlightenment because o f the s y n c h r o n o u s binary opposition which structures all literary language. T h e f u r t h e r these critical interpretations penetrate i n t o the " t r u t h " of a text, the m o r e they m u s t recognize their o w n and the texts' " e r r o r s . " Walter K a u f m a n n presses de M a n o n j u s t this point of misreading: KAUFMANN: In connection with his own reading of Hamlet Freud says that this is merely one interpretation. Freud doesn't say it is a misreading. He says it is merely one reading, but there can be others, which is more nearly a way of saying that there can be many plausible, interesting, rich readings. But you are saying they are all misreadings. (NTR, 50) D e M a n r e s p o n d s to this objection b y claiming that all readings m a k e s o m e pretense to "totalization" and t o "being r i g h t " and that as a result o f this claim of privilege, such readers believe in the possibility of o n e reading, perhaps of a cumulative one. B e g i n n i n g f r o m a "pluralistic perspective," h o w e v e r , a u n i q u e and total reading is n o t possible. It is f r o m this process of misreading, and n o t f r o m the " p r o g r e s s i v e " m o v e m e n t t o w a r d e n l i g h t e n m e n t , that a n e w literary history can emerge: DE MAN: You can develop the reading only if you are to some extent committed to it. And this is not just a question of historical perspective. The ongoing process of understanding and misunderstanding takes place among historical events as well as among texts. By a good misreading, I mean a text that produces another text which can itself be shown to be an interesting misreading, a text which engenders additional texts. If you have a poor text, you cannot make up a very rewarding construction. But, with Nietzsche, the possibilities are endless. (NTR, 51) Literary h i s t o r y , t h e n , is this " o n g o i n g process of u n d e r standing and m i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g " w h i c h is defined as interpreta[42]

Poetic Destruction tion or misreading. It is not an attempt to impose an order of development or dialectic upon a series of poems, but it is the process of allowing the truth to emerge f r o m the error of interpretation, f r o m the temporal process of encountering a text in understanding (Verstehen).15 It has no " e n d " just as it has no " o r igin." It is not a history of texts, nor is it a history of interpretation; rather it is both and neither since the very identity without sameness between text and the interpretation of it comprises the difference which makes literary understanding and historical u n derstanding possible. This means that "literary history" has n o center, but rather two foci, the text and the ongoing misunderstanding of it. Such a history of the understanding and misunderstanding of texts would provide the kind of literary history de M a n asks for: Could we conceive of a literary history that would not truncate literature by putting us misleadingly into or outside it, that would be able to maintain the literary aporia throughout, account at the same (ime for the truth and falsehood of the knowledge literature conveys about itself, distinguish rigorously between metaphorical and historical language, and account for literary modernity as well as for its historicity? (Bl, 164)

Although such a history of interpretation provides the new literary history de Man is looking for, it does avoid one complication which requires a modification of de Man's text and a somewhat fuller analysis of the nature of interpretation. I intend to provide the beginnings of the latter in m y next chapter on Heidegger's Being and Time. I can suggest, however, the simplification upon which de Man's already sophisticated theory rests. In their interpreations of Rousseau, D e Man's difference with Derrida centers upon the problem of whether or not Rousseau is mystified by the language he uses or whether he uses it indirectly, 1 6 that is, revealing its essential rhetoricity by employing it with full rhetorical flourish. D e Man concludes, perhaps unlike Derrida—although the latter's strategy in the second volume of [43]

Poetic Destruction De la grammatologie remains naturally ambivalent—that " O n the question of rhetoric, on the nature of figurai language, Rousseau was not deluded and said what he meant to say" (Bl, 135). In fact, it is de Man's theory that no poet needs to be demythologized: "when modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it" (Bl, 18). De Man is not willing to grant that any "fiction writer" can be blind or trapped within the logocentric or metaphysical tradition. For de Man, all literature exists on the far side of this tradition and emerges from an awareness of the unprivileged nature of literary language. He expresses this universal idea in "Crisis and Criticism": "All literatures, including the literature of Greece, have always designated themselves as existing in the mode of fiction" (Β1, 17). This remains de Man's unexamined presupposition about literary language and texts throughout Blindness and Insight. This unqualified "truth" of literature is always confused with logocentric presence by the misinterpretation of readers: "It is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that readers degrade fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave" (Bl, 17). This total separation of literature and "reality" is partially undercut in the last essay, "Lyric and Modernity." De Man establishes that the two foci of the lyric are allegory and representationalism, in which allegory "undermines and obscures the specific literal meaning of a representation," while the representation or reference to the world necessarily exists to make possible understanding of the poem (Bl, 185). Allegory and representationalism are unreducible and unsynthesizable "origins," a fact which undercuts de Man's earlier claim for fiction's total separation from the world. The pessimism and nihilism in de Man's work result from Rousseau's idea that poetic language merely names the void of "le néant des choses humaines," of the "presence of nothingness": "Poetic language names this void with ever-renewed understanding and, like Rousseau's longing, it never tires of naming it again. This persistent naming is what we call literature" (Bl, 18). The poet cannot confuse the "name" with a "real" près[44]

Poetic Destruction enee, according to de Man, because "the human self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from filling the void, asserts itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness, stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability" (Β1, 19). Although this privileged position of poetic knowledge is never once put explicitly into question by de Man, there are some indications, "much more tentative utterances," (BI, 106) which suggest that, in fact, poets are not always privileged and are sometimes in need of deconstruction. The problem is that the persistent naming of the void can in itself be misinterpreted as a naming of a "center." The repetitive offering of the same or similar name by a variety of writers creates the illusion that language is not creating a fiction, but is offering an "insight" which is not qualified in its privilege by "blindness." Such constantly repeated names form a habit, what Heidegger and Derrida would call tradition—as Bloom and Bate would readily concede—which functions more or less unconsciously within individuals. When this tradition or habit is firmly established (like the genetic pattern itself which is an element of the metaphysical or ontotheological, logocentric tradition), it obscures what is fresh, imaginative, and individual in the particular act of naming. This particularity of "original" naming is what de Man, following Nietzsche, calls "modernity." De Man himself admits that "modernity" not only is inseparable from history as one of the foci of literature, but that it is capable of being reduced by repetition to fashion or mode: Fashion (mode) can sometimes be only what remains of modernity after the impulse has subsided, as soon—and this can be almost at once—as it has changed from being an incandescent point in time to a reproducible cliché, all that remains of an invention that has lost the desire that produced it. (BI, 147) Literature, itself, is capable of such fashion to varying degrees. The writer like Rousseau, for whom it can be claimed, as de Man does, that he understood everything and is in no need of deconstruction, is rare. Derrida, in his study of Rousseau himself, [45]

Poetic Destruction remains ambiguous about his knowledge of what Rousseau's language revealed (BI, 116-18). In other words, Derrida accuses Rousseau of some blindness. Derrida's role as interpreter in this situation then is to deconstruct the logocentric assumptions in Rousseau by examining the language of differance within which they are contained. Rousseau could be used to n a r r o w the distance in understanding between de M a n and Derrida on this problem; here, however, I can only suggest that both de M a n and Derrida are right and w r o n g in their tales of Rousseau. D e M a n reveals Derrida's perhaps necessary blindness, that is, to the possibility that literature itself can approach total démystification at times, but as an observer, he is himself partially deconstructed by his exchange with Derrida. In the chapter on Rousseau, de M a n ' s c o m m i t m e n t to the absolute self-aware fictionality of all literature is revealed as an unexamined presupposition. In " T h e Rhetoric of Blindness" itself, it is possible to find some evidence of Derrida's deconstruction of de Man, one of those "tentative utterances" which reveal the blindness of all critical discourse. In a discussion of the problem of misreading and literary interpretation—which, of course, leads to the topic of literary history—de M a n hints at a possible blindness within a p o etic or literary tradition which might require deconstruction: I spoke above of the blindness of critics with regard to their own insights, of the discrepancy, hidden to them, between their stated method and their perceptions. In the history as well as in the historiography of literature, this blindness can take the form of a recurrently aberrant pattern of interpretation with regard to a particular writer. The pattern extends from highly specialized commentators to the vague idées reçues by means of which this writer is identified and classified in general histories of literature. It can even include other writers who have been influ-

enced by him. (BI, 111; italics mine) This admission by de Man is the basis for the construction of a "tradition" which is blind to the insight of " m o d e r n i t y " p r o vided by the "original" author. Later interpreters w h o c o m e [46]

Poetic Destruction closer t o an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the writer m u s t first, as Derrida does f o r Rousseau, destroy the sedimented interpretation w h i c h lies in b e t w e e n . O f crucial importance, h o w e v e r , in this a d m i s sion b y de M a n , is the possibility that certain poets, influenced by predecessors w h o o f course themselves u n d e r s t o o d fiction and the void, misinterpret their predecessors and are thus mystified and in need of deconstruction. In such situations, the interpreters' j o b is t o d e m y s t i f y these later writers in the tradition to reveal w h a t their acquiescence to t h e hardened tradition obscures, n a m e l y , the insight o f their great predecessors. F u r t h e r m o r e , this deconstruction or interpretation can be d o n e b y other poets u p o n their "traditional" forebears. T h e reading of previous texts is, of course, the necessary g r o u n d for the possibility of such deconstruction. While de M a n does not a n y w h e r e a d m i t this possibility explicitly—it w o u l d f u r t h e r c o m p l i cate the business of literary history to have the texts themselves involved in the act o f interpretation w h i c h he has reserved f o r critical w o r k s — h e does implicitly suggest that this is precisely w h a t happens. In the " P r e f a c e " t o Blindness and Insight, de M a n explains that h e chooses t o deal w i t h critical texts because t h e p r o b l e m s of reading, w h i c h are the key to understanding the nature of literary language, are clearest in them: The reason [for dealing with critical texts] is that prior to theorizing about literary language, one has to become aware of the complexities of reading. And since critics are a particularly self-conscious and specialized kind of reader, these complexities are displayed with particular clarity in their work. They do not occur with the same clarity to a spontaneous, non-critical reader. . . . Neither are the complexities of reading [i.e., of reading other texts] easily apparent in a poem or a novel, where they are so deeply embedded in the language that it takes extensive interpretation to bring them to light. (BI, viii) P o e m s and novels then are implicitly misreadings, interpretations, of other p o e m s , novels, and interpretations. In fact, one [47]

Poetic Destruction might extrapolate from this that poems are interpretations of other poems and subject, therefore, to the same structure of blindness and insight, of differance, which "afflicts" critical discourse. Poetry exists in a condition of truth and error. A fuller justification of this notion requires a theory of language itself as interpretation which, I believe, can be found in Being and Time. Literary history must be extended to include not only the series of critical misreading of a given text, but also the interrelationships among poems as they are interpretations, deconstructions, of each other. It must also be said, although justification for it must be reserved until the next chapter, that this process of interpretation is reciprocal: the later text does not merely open up the earlier and make it say what it did not mean to say, but the earlier text in turn opens up the later so that interpretation and literary history become integral, but not identical parts of the process of literary understanding. De Man's own blindness is to this interpretive interrelationship among poems and forms. Because he misses this idea, which at times he himself approximates, his theory of literary history remains partially mystified. It is based upon the "privilege" that poets enjoy of not falling into the traps of language. As a result of this assumption, there is no need for a criticism of poetry which deconstructs and no need for a poetry of destruction. Interpretation and literary history are reduced by de Man to the process of unending "correction" of critical misreadings of major texts which leaves the actual relationship among poems in doubt. Once, however, the possibility of a destructive, hermeneutical poetry is allowed to emerge from de Man's o w n speculations on the nature of literary language, a closer approximation to the problem of critical interpretation becomes possible. Thus, interpretation, the way poems are read, is returned to the sphere of time and history in such a way that de Man's cautions about linear and dialectical genetic fallacies are no longer valid objections to this "new literary history."

[48]

Chapter T w o

Heidegger's Phenomenological Destruction: A Theory of Poetic Interpretation ι American critical theory and literary history has been dominated for the past thirty-five years by the N e w Critics. Contemporary theoreticians like Bate, Bloom, de Man, and some few others in the United States have attempted to suggest alternative critical conceptions which escape the deadening influences of the N e w Critics' unrestricted formalism. Although Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and archetypal theory seemed for a while to offer a way out of the dead end of Brooks and Ransom and Tate and all the others, it became apparent that Frye's own "revolt" against mere close reading and his sweeping systematization of literature is only the completion of the N e w Critical impulse to stabilize literary conventions to produce meaning. For Frye, literature as an institution is hermetic and nonrelational. Furthermore, the N e w Critics' impulse to circularity, to deny time through closed or circular form—which I discuss more fully in my next chapter—climaxes in Frye's theory of circular literary history in which the ironic mode gradually returns to the beginning in the high mimetic, mythic mode. Although the dissatisfaction with the N e w Critical vocabulary and method has not been too widespread in American universities—Brooks' and Warren's Understanding Literature has just [49]

Martin Heidegger been revised and reissued—individual critics have hoped, almost in isolation, to find more humane and vital approaches to literature. There has been a renewed interest in literary history and in the connection between literary interpretation and the possibilities of history. But even the best of these attempts falter upon inadequate theories of language and interpretation. De Man comes closest, I think, to being aware of the full range of complexities involved, but even he does not completely think through the implications of modern phenomenological theories of understanding, language, and time for literary texts and history. The complexity of Modern and Postmodern literature requires an equally complex literary criticism. Unlike the New Critics, contemporary critics cannot afford the luxury of philosophical inexactness in justifying their enterprise. They cannot let their language remain uninformed by the insights of those like Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, and de Man. Nor can they hope to. practice their craft authentically if their comprehension of the nature of language, understanding, and interpretation is not worked out upon as sound a basis as they can achieve. As de Man says, there is a crisis of criticism; there is a challenge to its first principles which must be responded to with all of the tools at hand. Modern and Postmodern literature offers a challenge not only to positivistic criticism—biographical and "influence" or "source" studies—but to the various "objectifying" modes of critical thought which developed to fill the vacuum when the scientific method was thrown into question by this literature itself. In response to this challenge by literature, criticism, if it is to remain adequate to its task, must restructure its grounds so that it can confront this literature—and undoubtedly that of the past—in a new way, that is, by revealing both what New Criticism obscures in it as well as what it remains blind to within itself. Bloom and Bate, as we have seen, avoid the problem of language as rhetoric in constructing their own myths of influence. As a result, they actually establish exactly what they hoped to [50]

Martin Heidegger disprove. Both writers dismiss the possibility that language itself, as the store-house of tropes, ideas, and interpretations could be the burden or anxiety of the past. Both critics insist upon the priority of their atemporal models because they can postulate in them a constant pattern, an unchanging system which rests upon a continuous and, therefore, nonhistorical "tradition" and an equally unchanging psychology of self. Bate realizes that the eighteenth century's claim that the past inheres in language, that language can be and is used up by the past and hardens into tradition, is very dangerous to traditional modes of criticism which themselves rest on precisely this hardened, unchanging, accumulated tradition of language. However, Bate displaces the burden of the past from this radical conception of language and its relation to time to the simpler model of one self, for the sake of greatness, confronting the tradition and using it. Bloom, of course, admits that he is trying to avoid all the decentering he sees in deconstructive criticism, in critical interpretation which realizes that language is rhetorical, that is, that it contains within itself sedimented patterns of expression which are inherited from the past and which block the poet's ability to create new works and to examine the world around him. Bloom admits that his enterprise is to reinstate and to rest upon that very tradition which he so desperately guards from the deconstructions of linguistically oriented critics. The great lengths to which Bate and Bloom go to shift literary criticism and history away from literary language and form and toward nonintrinsic models for interpretation reveal their dread of the self-destructive potential in a criticism which is willing not only to reexamine the various critical interpretations of the past, but to challenge them in their most fundamental premises. Tradition must at all costs remain constant and sacrosanct for these critics. If it is not, then we are either deluded, as Bate would have it, or degenerate sadomasochists like Pynchon, as Bloom would have it. In fact, both of these critics are reactionaries. They are trying to continue the solidification of the tradition which has domi[51]

Martin Heidegger nated Western criticism for hundreds of years and which has also effected western poetry. De Man's work suggests some of the reasons for their defensiveness. Once the critic is stripped of the presuppositions upon which he bases his enterprise, the text and the reader are deprived of stability, and criticism emerges as radical flux, in which the text and the interpretation of it are constantly modifying, adjusting, and perhaps even destroying each other. In other words, literary criticism, and the tradition from which it cannot be separated, becomes susceptible to the same uncertainty and indefiniteness which threw science and mathematics into turmoil much earlier in the century. Ironically, it finally becomes "Modern," that is, it comes to share the potential dispersion of its central tropes (the "objectivity" of the text and the privileged position of the reader), just as painting during the cubist movement, for example, had its central tenets (representati onalism, the unified plane, and color theory) disintegrated by theories of relativity and uncertainty. The privilege that criticism in some way "makes sense" of literature, especially of a Modern or Postmodern literature which quite precisely refuses to "make sense," can be displaced by destroying the extrinsic models of Bate, Bloom, Todorov, Frye, Culler, and the New Critics. 1 Bate and Bloom, then, are aware of the potential threat to criticism's existence as a special, nonmodern event in the Modern world and they want to preserve its privileged status. It is not incidental that they are both primarily scholars of the late 18th and early 19th century. Nor is it mere accident that they both see Modernism and Postmodernism as the ultimate decline of the Romantic movement, the high point of a decline begun in the Renaissance. They sense in Modern and Postmodern literature a threat to the habitual interpretations of the entire myth of Tradition—promulgated by Eliot, Brooks, and the New Criticism and debunked by Frank Kermode 2 —as the decline of the west "beginning" with the death of the metaphysical imagination, the last vestige of the medieval metaphor of correspondence and the hierarchical Image of the Great Chain of Being. As I pointed out in my first chapter, Bate and Bloom begin [52]

Martin Heidegger with the assumption that the N e w Criticism does not provide an adequate theory of poetic history. But as I also indicated, Bate and Bloom's models are insufficient as well; they are essentially atemporal. For the N e w Critics, the nonreferentiality of closed poetic structure leaves no opportunity for a poetic history based upon the interrelationships of texts. For both Bate and Bloom, the tradition in some way becomes the logos, an incarnate order which the imagination uses as a bulwark against the chaos of nature and fragmentation. Paradoxically, while searching for a literary history, they coerce literature into a spatialized model of literary texts which appear to be stabilized and visualized because they are described as objects "out there." This "objective," scientific model enables criticism to clarify the ambiguities and uncertainties of literature itself. Once a text is "defined," it operates as the matrix of meaning; the model closes off possibilities for human action and creation. Indeed, it is only by virtue of this restriction upon possibilities that criticism can hope to offer, not misreadings as de Man rightly prefers, but what Kaufmann defends, a series of readings which are believed to be "right." I hope that my "reading" of de Man's and Nietzsche's destruction of the traditional forms which this literary history often takes has suggested its inadequacy. It would be possible to extend this privative study of traditional forms of literary criticism and history from the perspective of Martin Heidegger, and the phenomenological critics generally, but I prefer instead to draw out of Being and Time an authentic mode of interpretation which results in a form of history that can justify the theory of poetic destruction which I hinted at in the last chapter. This justification needs to be outlined before I move directly to Heidegger.

II There are essentially two facts to be drawn out of Heidegger which are necessary to justify the theory of poetic destruction: first, that all authentic uses of language are interpretations, spe[53]

Martin Heidegger cifìcally destructions; second, that interpretation as the completion of the moment of understanding (Verständnis) which discloses and un-covers (aletheia) is a process which leads necessarily to a more vital, and temporal, sense of literary history than those which I have already discussed and will discuss in the next chapter. My discussion of Heidegger begins by examining his methodology, i.e., phenomenological destruction (Destruktion), and his notion of truth. Circularly, his method is justified by the way in which it reveals truth as he defines it, while his idea of truth is validated only insofar as the method allows it to be seen as such. In his language, one might say that these two ideas are existentially-ontologically equiprimordial in Being and Time.3 Therefore, in recounting my understanding of them there is no absolute priority in beginning with the idea of truth as aletheia, which dominates not only Being and Time, but remains a critical element of all phases of his thought. The complete inseparability of Heidegger's "method" and his idea of "truth" can be seen in his derivation of the concept of "uncoveredness" from the traditional theories of truth as correspondence, judgment, and assertion (BT, 257). Heidegger destroys these traditional ideas in order to show that they are derived from the primordial character of truth which they obscure. When they are destroyed, they reveal that their sole basis is "Being-uncovered": " T o say that an assertion 'is true' signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, 'lets' the entity 'be seen' (αττόοοωσiç) in its uncoveredness. The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering" (BT, 261). Heidegger uncovers this primordial sense of truth from its concealment within the tradition. It is, as the intersection of destructive methodology and the discovery of aletheia, a virtual center in Being and Time and an appropriate starting point for the story of poetic destruction and literary history. Heidegger himself points out in section 44b, "The Primordial Phenomenon of Truth and the Derivative Character of the Traditional Conception of Truth," that the authenticity of this theory of truth [54]

Martin Heidegger validates his methodology. And, of course, the success of his methodology in finding justification for this idea of truth in the tradition shows aletheia to be "only the necessary Interpretation of what was primordially surmised in the oldest tradition of ancient philosophy and even understood in a pre-phenomenological manner" (BT, 262). This is one of the most important of Heidegger's "retrieves" from the tradition of a dis-closure which had been forgotten in the reified tradition of truth as judgment. He recalls Heraclitus's definition of truth as aletheia, and destroys Aristotle's concept of aletheia to show that it too "signifies what shows itself—entities in the 'how' of their uncoveredness" (BT, 262). Moreover, in a destruction which will have more import a bit further on when I deal explicitly with the "phenomenological destruction," Heidegger finds not only in Heraclitus but in Aristotle as well the idea that logos means "unhiddenness." This meaning is lost by translating it as "truth" and needs to be reclaimed (BT, 262). Rhetorically, this section of Being and Time insists that the only means to truth is through a rethinking of the tradition. Destruction is not a purely privative process, although this is clearly a possible misconception which concerns Heidegger throughout Being and Time: "Must we not pay for this dubious gain [into the essence of truth as aletheia ] by plunging the 'good' old tradition into nullity?" (BT, 262). After performing a brief destruction of Aristotle, Heidegger answers his own question: "In proposing our 'definition' of 'truth' we have not shaken off the tradition, but we have appropriated it primordially . . ." (BT, 262). The rhetorical juxtaposition of the definition of truth and the defense of the destructive orientation toward the past makes quite clear that, as W.B. Macomber argues in The Anatomy of Disillusion, "there is no other approach to truth except through constant and resolute reflection on tradition." 4 The reasons for this are varied and complex, but since I am not attempting a complete exposition of Heidegger here, only one is of immediate interest, the truth of Dasein as uncovering. Following the definition of the essence of truth as aletheia, [55]

Martin Heidegger Heidegger m o v e s to an exposition of the ontological disclosedness of Dasein as primordial truth, that is, " u n c o v e r i n g . " " B e i n g - u n c o v e r e d , " that is, "uncoveredness," is a second sense of truth and applies to those entities which are disclosed by Dasein (BT, 263). Although the largest significance of this interpretation for Heidegger is its justification of his o w n enterprise— " t h e disclosedness of [Dasein's] o w n m o s t Being belongs to its existential constitution" (BT, 263)—it is thematically i m p o r t a n t to m y story because it involves a crucial paradox: "Dasein is 'in the truth.' " A n d "Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of Being is such that it is in 'untruth' " (BT, 263, 264). In other w o r d s , by arguing that there is n o truth independently of Dasein, since Dasein alone discloses, the essence of truth is "adulterated" by the facticity and fallenness, the finitude, of Dasein's Being-inthe-World. Error and truth are equally existential possibilities of Dasein as special instances of the inauthentic and authentic modes of Being. T h u s , Dasein m u s t wrest f r o m the hiddenness of u n truth the possibility of disclosedness which it also contains: Proximally and for the most part Dasein is lost in its "world." Its understanding, as a projection upon possibilities of Being, has diverted itself thither. Its absorption in the "they" signifies that it is dominated by the way things are publicly interpreted. That which has been uncovered and disclosed stands in a mode in which it has been disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Being towards entities has not been extinguished, it has been uprooted. Entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been [sic] uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance. Likewise what has formerly been uncovered sinks back again hidden and disguised. (BT, 264) Because of Dasein's propensity to fall into idle talk, destruction, or the authentic use of language, in an attempt to regain what has fallen back, m u s t be violent. Furthermore, truth can only emerge w h e n Dasein stands in a destructive relationship to the past, to [56]

Martin Heidegger what has been previously discovered, but which is now coveredover and remains as only a semblance of its "originality." Heidegger explicitly charges Dasein with the role of confronting this constant falling back into hiddenness: It is therefore essential that Dasein should expliridy appropriate what has already been uncovered, defend it against semblance and disguise, and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again. The uncovering of anything new is never done on the basis o f having something completely hidden, but takes its departure rather from uncoveredness in the m o d e of semblance. Entities look as i f . . . That is, they have, in a certain way, been uncovered already, and yet they are still disguised.

(BT, 265) This general need to reclaim what the past, the tradition has discovered, and covered over, "again and again," is the ground for the theory of literary history I am suggesting. Interpretation (I purposely leave this word vague at this point) of all kinds attempts to achieve this ongoing recovery. In fact, the retrieve of the past, in the present, for the sake of our possibilities, that is, of our future, is also the only way literary history can get beyond the traps which contemporary literature and interpretation pose for traditional histories. Because of Dasein's facticity and fallenness, something which is uncovered can itself become obscure, but furthermore, it can, as discovered, block further unhiddenness. Thus, "truth" can in and of itself not only emerge from "untruth"—all disclosure must result from semblance or illusion—but become, once assimilated to assertion about the present-at-hand (BT, 266-67), part of the idle talk, the inauthentic illusion of the "they" world, of the obfuscating, inherited, unthought-of tradition. Macomber phrases the truth-untruth complex in a way which leaves no doubt as to its existential necessity in Heidegger's thought as well as to its ontological priority: The discovery o f being can occur only on the basis of what has already been revealed, though partially and inadequately. Yet [57]

Martín Heidegger the partial revelation draws away from what is yet to be revealed—from its own limitations and imperfections—and thereby becomes an obstacle to further revelation, an illusion which has to be overcome. (AD, 126) For this reason, interpretation, destruction, the violence necessary to wring truth f r o m closure must be ongoing. Furthermore, it m u s t be prepared to destroy previous destructive interpretations in order t o bring to light, to let be manifest in themselves, the various facets and aspects of a being or idea which any one interpretation, or as de M a n would have it, any one misreading, necessarily obscures. Destruction must be performed "again and again." As M a c o m b e r says, "illusion must provide the material of k n o w l e d g e as well as its impetus and direction. . . . k n o w l edge can never fully divest itself of its illusory origins if it is to m a k e sense" (AD, 129). " D i - v e s t , " "dis-close," "un-cover," these are all privative terms. In fact, as Heidegger defines it, the process of getting to " t r u t h " is a negative function. "A-leitheia" is a privative expression. Therefore, obtaining access to truth through semblance m u s t be a violent process: Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their unhiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery. Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth they use a privative expression—ά-ληββια? (BT, 265. Italics mine.) T h e need for this violence signifies that Dasein is always and for the most part in u n t r u t h , in the inauthentic mode. It is difficult b u t necessary that he wrench himself out of this m o d e in order to let things be, to emerge out of their cover under the force of his active destruction of the obscuring tradition and semblance. But once again, this u n t r u t h or error is not something which is "des t r o y e d " once and for all. Like the tradition itself, it can never be reduced to "nullity": " u n t r u t h is . . . to be found . . . at the center of [Dasein's] being as radically finite, as existence, project, [58]

Martin Heidegger or care. Truth and untruth belong together to the being of man, and not merely to the being of man but to the totality of being as such" (AD, 130). According to Heidegger, what is disclosed falls into semblance by the agencies of idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Of course, in the context of literature, the idea of idle talk is of most interest. In the immediate context of his discussion of the primordial and derivative senses of truth, Heidegger points out how the authentic use of language to bring about disclosure becomes, through its repetition in an assertion, an inauthentic expression of something present-at-hand in which Dasein's disclosedness is covered-up. According to Heidegger, what is disclosed falls into semblance by the agencies of idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Of course, in the context of literature, the idea of idle talk is of most interest. In the immediate context of his discussion of the primordial and derivative senses of truth, Heidegger points out how the authentic use of language to bring about disclosure becomes, through its repetition in an assertion, an inauthentic expression of something present-at-hand in which Dasein's disclosedness is covered-up. Assertion of something which is disclosed to understanding rests upon that understanding and its interpretive structure. Assertion is meant to maintain the existence of what has been disclosed: "The assertion . . . contains the uncoveredness of these entities. The uncoveredness is preserved in what is expressed" (BT, 266). Thus, language is authentic not only when it acts violently to bring about disclosure and to articulate it, but when it preserves what has been discovered in the act of understanding. Assertion makes possible the repetition of the truth disclosed primordially by an other. This in itself, however, is not inauthentic: "Dasein need not bring itself face to face with entities themselves in an 'original' experience; but it nevertheless remains in a Being-towards these entities" (BT, 266). However, the inauthentic, illusory use of language—the idle talk of the "they"—is made possible by the very nature of assertion: "What is expressed becomes, as it were, something ready-to-hand [59]

Martin Heidegger within-the-world which can be taken up and spoken again" (BT, 266). Authenticity is lost when the assertion persists and becomes habitual, the unthinking common sense of the "they." What had been disclosed in language and preserved in assertion is coveredover. The "disclosed" becomes merely present-at-hand (vorhanden), i.e., an object absorbed by Dasein's abstract and theoretical judgment as Dasein stands off from the world. Dasein's involvement with the "disclosed" is eliminated; the "circumspective concern" (BT, 57-59) in which he discovered the interrelationship among things as implements in his environment as well as their actual usefulness as "ready-to-hand" (zuhanden) is conceptualized and objectified by repeated assertions: "In a large measure uncoveredness gets appropriated not by one's own uncovering, but rather by hearsay of something that has been said. Absorption in something that has been said belongs to the kind of Being which the 'they' possesses" (BT, 266-67). The language of the "they" is, of course, inauthentic precisely because it solidifies and covers-up; it preempts the possibility of individual discovery. "Idle talk" not only covers-up something disclosed, but it also reifies language itself. In the process of transforming the insight or discovery made by language into the mime of hearsay, of what is overheard without understanding, the "they" world reduces language itself to an instrument which is present-athand. Language becomes a "thing" to be studied objectively, shaped, and abstracted. " T r u t h " in the world of the "they" becomes the degree to which the solidifed "statement" "about" some solidified "object" corresponds to the observable "facts of the case." The reification of the discovered by the idle talk of the "they" parallels the traditional metaphysical insistence that truth is a matter of judging the degree of correspondence between proposition and object. Since Dasein primarily and for the most part belongs to the "they" world, language is usually inauthentic. Macomber suggests that inauthentic existence of the everyday world of the "they" is "untrue," which implies quite clearly that inauthentic [60]

Martin Heidegger language is also quite "untrue" (AD, 90). Indeed, such language, the "idle talk" of the "they" and the propositional-judgmental form of traditional notions of truth, makes possible the continuity of the tradition and the bourgeois world by holding off at a distance the potential revelations of Being and nothingness which threaten to upset it. The inauthenticity, the "untruth," of language in the tradition needs to be destroyed to reveal what it obscures as well as to bring out of it—as Heidegger has done with Kant—whatever "truth" the tradition intended to say but could not because it remained to some extent trapped within its own historical inauthenticity. For the literary critic or historian, the predominance of untruth in language demands a destructive stance in the face of previous interpretations of texts—interpretations which are themselves articulated for the most part in the language of the tradition—as well as an awareness that insofar as a primary text is authentic—intending to bring the truth out from its cover—it too stands in a destructive relationship to earlier texts, tropes, forms, and structures of the language of the tradition. The central role of language in the theory of truth is carried a step further in this section when Heidegger, destroying Aristode once more, argues that "the λόγος is that way of Being in which Dasein can either uncover or cover up. This double possibility is what is distinctive in the Being-true of the λόγος: the λόγος is that way of comporting one-self which can also cover things up" (BT, 268). This dualistic definition of logos is of crucial importance because of Heidegger's earlier definition of logos as Rede, i.e., as speech (BT, 55-58). Ontologically, these two uses of language are equiprimordial and they are both basic to truth. But ai a potential for disclosure and to avoid the "cover-up" also inhermt in speech, logos must not be merely "speech" but destructon, that is, to fulfill the potential of logos to disclose, speed must violently draw out of the sedimented tradition of idle ták those "original" or "primordial" experiences of Dasein's disclosing. Heidegger's own "speech," that is, his own authentic use oí language, is undertaken in the hope of reclaiming the lost [61]

Martin Heidegger idea of Being from the idle talk, the illusion, the inauthenticity of the tradition. The phenomenological destruction of the metaphysical tradition which Being and Time performs is authentic speech, the logos. In its retrieve of the Being question from the tradition and in its disclosure of temporality as the horizon of Dasein and of Being, Being and Time establishes destruction as the hermeneutic stance of the authentic logos.5 The "methodological" passages of the second "Introduction" point out that destruction, phenomenology, and interpretation (hermeneutics) are stages of the same process of "dis-closing" what the tradition has reduced to habit and the "natural attitude" as well as of exposing what it has chosen to ignore. As Being and Time develops, Heidegger establishes that all linguistic efforts to move away not only from the tradition but from the "idle talk" of the "they," possess the same destructive, interpretive, phenomenological structure as his own assault on the metaphysical tradition's cover-up of Being, nothingness, and temporality. For the authentic literary critic a recognition of this necessary destructive function in art which is authentic—that is, which brings out the nothingness and Being which the tradition covers-up—compels literary criticism and history to abandon the N e w Critical, Bloomian, genetic, and structuralist models. Verbal art can no longer be experienced as simply nonreferential, autotelic, and atemporal as these critical theories assume it can; rather, literature must be met as the temporal event of a human's understanding disclosure. Sections six and seven of Being and Time conjoin destruction, phenomenology, and interpretation in the methodological center of the second "Introduction." The task of interrogating Being and the Being of Dasein necessitates an inquiry into the history o f t h a t interrogation (BT, 42). The fullest possibilities of the inquiry require that the past's interrogation of Being be made "positively" our own. Furthermore, the essential historicality of Dasein, which itself may be hidden, can be revealed in and by tradition. The very existence of a tradition as a context for Dasein and as an "object" of study makes clear the necessary exis[62]

Martin Heidegger tence of a human being in a situation defined by the "past" which lies "before" him, i.e., as the complex of expectations and goals which he gains, or loses, by his "place" within the tradition: "Dasein can discover tradition, preserve it, and study it explicidy. The discovery of tradition and the disclosure of what it 'transmits' and h o w this is transmitted, can be taken hold of as a task in its own right. In this way Dasein brings itself into the kind of Being which consists in historiological inquiry and research" (BT, 41). However, the condition for the possibility of seizing the tradition as an "event" to be studied is Dasein's "historicality" (Geschichtlichkeit). In other words, although Dasein can discover his historicality by learning he has and is in a tradition, Dasein can have a tradition and can study it only because he is always already radically temporal, i.e., historical. In a passage which is crucial in suggesting the importance of the destruction of the past for the possibilities of the future, Heidegger summarizes the relationship between Dasein's temporality and his potential for historiology: Dasein "is" its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, "historizes" (geschieht) out of its future on each occasion. Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally and, within a certain range, constandy. By this understanding, the possibilities of its Being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past—and this always means the past of its "generation"—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it. (BT, 41) Because Dasein is fallen, tradition (just like the logos itself) possesses, or is defined by, the potentiality for authentic and inauthentic existence. In both cases, the authentic is distinguished by disclosure, while the inauthentic, the untrue, is marked by covered-up-ness. Just as the assertion might preserve a disclosure made by others and might, when part of authentic discourse, reveal what [63]

Martin Heidegger has been hidden to the other in the dialogue, so tradition may preserve whatever authentic insight into Being has been achieved. Tradition is inauthentic, however, when it degenerates into habit, into the dominant and "natural" view-point of the "they." When it remains unquestioned and assumed, it solidifies and conceals, it transmits untruth; it is no longer what Bloom calls mishnah, but a kind of "tradition" which betrays what it should pass on: Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world (the world in which it is) and to interpret itself in terms of that world by reflected light, but also Dasein . . . simultaneously falls prey to the tradition of which it has more or less explicitly taken hold. . . . When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it "transmits" is made so inaccessible . . . that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence. (BT, 42—43) Just as what is disclosed in aletheia falls back into semblance, into appearance, mere appearance, or metaphor, so the primordial access to Being which lies preserved in the tradition loses its urgency and meaning and becomes the accepted, present-athand, utilitarian, "natural" system of the "truth" of the crowd. When the instrumentality of this hardened tradition fails, when it "breaks-down" (as the work of Hegel and Nietzsche in philosophy, of Heisenberg and Einstein in physics, and of innumerable poets shows the atemporal, Cartesian, anthropomorphic, and ego-centric Renaissance tradition to have done), then a sense, an intuition, of the meaning and importance which it has long obscured is recognized. Specifically, the culminating failure of western metaphysics in Hegel and Nietzsche—as Heidegger sees it—reawakens explicitly the Being-question as the forgotten issue of western tradition. This idea is clear in Heidegger's own large-scale reexaminations of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche as well as in his destructions of Thomistic, Cartesian, and Aristotelian theories in Being and Time. Heidegger's famous discussion of the hammer indicates that only when a tool fails to work does its [64]

Martin Heidegger ontological significance as an i n s t r u m e n t within a larger context i n - t h e - w o r l d b e c o m e apparent. Similarly, the b r e a k d o w n of the tradition reveals truth that could not be seen as long as, crisisfree, the tradition " w o r k e d . " 6 " D e s t r u c t i o n " is the m e t h o d o l o g y by w h i c h the intuition granted by the failure of the tradition is articulated. In fact, d e struction cannot proceed w i t h o u t an initial i n c o m p l e t e awareness of w h a t is concealed; insofar as destruction e m e r g e s f r o m t h e structure of interpretation, "it is . . . t h e w o r k i n g - o u t o f possibilities projected in u n d e r s t a n d i n g " (BT, 189). Just as disclosure cannot result f r o m complete hiddenness, b u t m u s t e m e r g e f r o m semblance, or the appearance of s o m e t h i n g as s o m e t h i n g else, so destruction can only proceed f r o m w h a t H e i d e g g e r in his discussion of understanding calls a forestructure. This predisposition in the face of the tradition is the basis of the h e r m e n e u t i c circle, w h i c h I shall discuss again f u r t h e r on; h o w e v e r , it is e n o u g h to say here that, since understanding can o n l y e m e r g e as a result of this failure of tradition, destructive interpretation is always circular and shares in the basic structure o f the existential-ontological understanding o f Dasein. In his " d e f i n i t i o n " of destruction, H e i d e g g e r p o i n t s out h o w his particular destruction o f the metaphysical tradition begins f r o m an intuition, a clue given by the failed tradition itself: If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—ways which have guided us ever since. (BT, 44) B u t this destruction of the tradition, j u s t like the cutting a w a y of the concealing semblance or assertion t o disclose the truth w h i c h is covered-over, does n o t reduce the " c o v e r " to nullity. Rather, [65]

Martin Heidegger it opens it up to reveal what of value is concealed within the habitual ways of looking at the tradition: But this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and this always means keeping it within its limits; these in turn are given factically in the way the question is formulated at the time, and the way the possible field for investigation is thus bounded off. (BT, 44) These statements on method can be explicated to reveal broader implications for the possibilities of interpretation resting on a destruction. I intend to delay this explication, however, until other essential terms of the project and their interrelationships are developed. Heidegger begins section 6 by postulating that "Dasein's Being finds its meaning in temporality" (BT, 41). It is the aim of his entire project to work out this proposition to establish the relationship—perhaps the identity—of Being and Time. His interpretation of the relationship of Dasein and tradition as well as his deconstructions of Kant and Descartes discloses temporality both as the ground of Dasein's Being—which thus makes possible the examination of the tradition—and as the validation of the destructive method of interpretation: In other words, in our process of destruction we find ourselves faced with the task of Interpreting the basis of ancient ontology in the light of the problematic of Temporality. When this is done, it will be manifest that the ancient way of interpreting the Being of entities is oriented towards the "world" or "Nature" in the widest sense, and that it is indeed in terms of "time" that its understanding of Being is obtained. (BT, 47) Temporality as the ground of destructive methodology, and, more universally, of all understanding and interpretation, must be emphasized as an alternative to the timeless modes of literary interpretation and models of literary history which Modern and contemporary critics postulate. Most specifically, as we have [66]

Martin Heidegger seen with Bate and B l o o m , and as I will show in the next chapter for Brooks and m a n y other N e w Critics, finitude, the ground fact of human existence and, therefore, of interpretation, prevents the very possibility of timeless models because each of them is based u p o n the possibility of an infinite, i.e., spontaneous, instantaneous, divine, m o d e of perception and interpretation. Following his discussion of destruction in Section 6, Heidegger turns specifically to the deconstructed idea of logos as legein, as speech, which suggests the authentic orientation toward those entities which w e encounter within the world. Just prior to his famous methodological discussion of phenomenology as hermeneutics, Heidegger intimates that phenomenology, insofar as it stands in the face of the world, must share implicitly in the "structure" of destruction. Hermeneutical phenomenology proceeds from a clue or intuition gained in the m o m e n t when the habitual or instrumental orientation toward an entity—which may be a text in the tradition—fails, and then progresses to make explicit and exhibit what is hidden by the semblance which must be stripped away. Heidegger begins section 7, "The Phenomenological Method of Investigation," by asserting twice that phenomenology is a m e t h odological concept (BT, 49, 50). By the end of his discussion, though, phenomenology takes on thematic importance when it is identified with ontology itself (BT, 60). H e divides " p h e n o m e n o l o g y " into its t w o constitutive linguistic elements, " p h e n o m e n o n " and "logos." His opening etymological—perhaps even destructive—definition of the former parallels his definition of truth: Thus φαινόμίνον means that which shows itself, the manifest. Φαίί>€σθαι itself is a middle-voiced form which comes from φαίνω—to bring to the light of day, to put in the light. Φαίνω comes from the stem φα—like φως, the light, that which is bright—in other words, that wherein something can become manifest, visible in itself. Thus we must keep in mind that the expression "phenomenon" signifies that which shows itself in itself, [67]

Martin Heidegger the manifest. Accordingly, the φαινόμ&να or "phenomena" are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light. (BT, 51) In fact, since "phenomena" may need to be brought to light, phenomenology possesses, like aletheia and destruction, a privative function. Because these phenomena can fall back into hiddenness, they must often be forcibly disclosed. However, this uncovering only occurs because the phenomena which do not manifest themselves in themselves, but are concealed in semblance, appearance, and " m e r e " appearance, always include in themselves "the primordial signification," namely, "the phenomena as the manifest" (BT, 51). Phenomena possess the same dual possibility for disclosure and cover-up as the logos and tradition, the authentic self and the " t h e y " self. In fact, this dual potential rests upon the structure of the logos which Heidegger's "destruction" of the traditional interpretation of the/ojjoi reveals. Heidegger lays bare the idea of logos by explicitly identifying destruction with phenomenology: "In Plato and Aristotle the concept of the logos has many competing significations, with no basic signification positively taking the lead. In fact, however, this is only a semblance, which will maintain itself as long as our Interpretation is unable to grasp the basic signification properly in its primary content" (BT, 55). This "primary content" of the logos is legein or discourse; as such, it shares in the same revelatory or disclosing structure as phenomena, aletheia, and destruction (BT, 56). Heidegger explicitly identifies these various elements of his methodology as a prelude to establishing that logos as discourse is "just not the kind of thing that can be considered as the primary 'locus' of truth": Furthermore, because the λόγος is a letting-something-beseen, it can therefore be true, or false. . . . The "Being-true" of the λόγος as αληθεύειν means that in keyecv as αποφαίνΐσθαι the entities of which one is talking must be taken out of their hiddenness; one must let them be seen as something unhidden (άληθές); that is, they must be discovered. Similarly, "Being [68]

Martin Heidegger false" (ψεύδ&τθαι) amounts to deceiving in the sense of covering up: putting something in front of something (in such a way as to let it be seen) and thereby passing it offa* something which it is not. (BT, 56-57) O n l y the noein can be primordially true, i.e., free of the possibility of covering-up. "Discourse," logos as legeitt, is a way to truth, is a m o d e of "dis-covery" only when "it is genuine," when it does not reveal something in appearance, mere appearance, or metaphor. Although "discourse" becomes "fully concrete" when it takes on the character of "vocal proclamation in words," the mere presence of oral speech is not enough to assure the process of "un-covering." This point must be made against those 7 w h o would argue for the priority of oral language to writing on the grounds that the former, as nonliterary, i.e., "authentic," is the primary way to reveal what the tradition obscures. Heidegger does not grant speech such complete privilege. "Discourse" as orality possesses the dual possibilities of authenticity and inaut e n t i c i ty. Only when it violently breaks open the tradition can it be authentic. "Writing," as Derrida suggests throughout his w o r k , 8 can be equally "primordial" in the task of "de-constructing" the tradition. The far-from-oral poetry of Wallace Stevens, for example, offers perhaps the fullest Modern paradigm of writing in the service of disclosing nothingness. It is primarily in linear writing of logocentric metaphysics that the West has reified its past and its vital re-sources—as Heidegger's written destruction of written texts makes clear—and, therefore, it must be to a confrontation with the essentially literate structure of that tradition that h e r m e n e u t i j destruction must turn. Certainly Charles Olson senses the necessity for confronting this written tradition in order to make it "speak" again when he attacks "discourse" in his Special View of History9 and praises the opportunities afforded the contemporary poet by the typewriter to break open the lines and hard forms of the tradition in order to show what it conceals. 10 Heidegger's analysis of the structure of phenomenology has [69]

Martin Heidegger proceeded by his dis-assembling the constituent parts of the term to uncover w h a t they contain or conceal. In order to clarify the formal nature of p h e n o m e n o l o g y as term and m e t h o d , he "re-assembles" these parts—phenomenon and logos: " t o let that which shows itself be seen f r o m itself in the very way in which it shows itself f r o m itself" (BT, 58). And as w e have seen in all the other terms of this structure of "dis-closure" which I have been d r a w ing o u t of Being and Time, Heidegger points out that Being, which is allowed to s h o w itself in this way, "can be covered up so extensively that it becomes forgotten and n o question arises about it or about its m e a n i n g " (BT, 59). In order to prevent this obscuring of w h a t is disclosed, Dasein actively destroys or interprets whatever semblance threatens to cover-up the phenomenon. Michael Gel ven, in his Commentary on Being and Time, suggests that in his formal definition of a phenomenology which requires interpretation to reveal the "thing itself," Heidegger threatens himself with a contradiction: The difficulty is that many phenomenologists argue that Heidegger's "hermeneutic phenomenology" is a contradiction in terms. They maintain . . . that in the tradition of Edmund Husserl—the father of modern phenomenology—the whole purpose of this method is to achieve a vision of consciousness untainted by "systems" or interpretations: to let the facts speak for themselves, as it were. . . . If Heidegger's methodolgy is interpretive, and if phenomenology means to let the facts speak for themselves, in whatever sense that can be taken without being ridiculous, then surely a hermeneutic phenomenology is impossible. (C, 34) Gelven decides that this is really not a contradiction but a dilemma which Heidegger avoids because of the specific nature of his task: the analysis of existential experience. H o w e v e r , the necessary connection between "interpretation" or "hermeneutics" and aletheia and destruction which I have been suggesting all along can provide a m o r e satisfactory explanation than the one Gelven offers. [70]

Martin Heidegger Heidegger not only labels his variety of phenomenology "hermeneutic," but he also identifies it with destruction: "The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of the word, where it designates this business of interpreting" (BT, 62). In historical terms, it is "a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology" (BT, 63). Since discourse, logos, aletheia, phenomenon, and phenomenology itself all possess the potential for hiddenness, of allowing what they reveal to fall back, to be "buried over" (BT, 60), they must be structurally completed by hermeneutics or interpretation to assure their authenticity: "the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation" (BT, 61). In other words, when a truth or a phenomenon is covered-over and presents itself only as a semblance, it can only be regained and redis-covered when "our passage through whatever is prevalently covering it up" is "secured by the proper method." (BT, 61). Phenomenology itself is violent (BT, 61), because, in the face of the cover-up, of the semblance, it must "exhibit" and "explicate" the truth or phenomenon. "The λόγος of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of a έρμην€ύ€ΐν, through which the authentic meaning of Being, and also those basic structures of Being which Dasein itself possesses, are made known to Dasein's understanding." (BT, 62). The key phrase in defining Heidegger's violent destructive phenomenology is "making known to Dasein's understanding." Yet, circularly, this process begins from the phenomenon or truth itself which is present as error or semblance and "explicit to our awareness by further analysis or discrimination of the given, rather than by any inference from it" (BT, 106-7, η. 1). The understanding, then, performs this preliminary disclosure in the very nature of its structure as constituent of the "world." Thus, Dasein's act of uncovering the world in understanding is analogous to phenomenology and in a similar way requires interpretation or hermeneutics to render what is "intuited" or incompletely understood "explicit." But, like phenomenology itself, and the other disclosing (71]

Martin Heidegger structures which emerge from Heidegger's Dasein analytic, understanding also is capable of inauthenticity, i.e., of covering-up. "Understanding is either authentic, arising out of one's own Self as such, or inauthentic." And its inauthenticity "arises" when Dasein does, "Proximally and for the most part, understand itself in terms of its world" (BT, 186). In other words, when Dasein abandons or forgets its own nature as "potentiality-for-Being," when it falls into the hardened world of the "they" self and accepts what is, "naturally," ignoring its potential for possibility, for change, for becoming something other than what-it-is, then it covers-over primordially. In effect, at this point, having forgotten the nature of its own Being, it even loses the possibility of disclosure and abandons itself and the world to hiddenness, habit, and opacity. Of course, such an extreme cover-up can never be total. Just as truth emerges from error and phenomenon from semblance, Dasein's "Being-possible is transparent to itself in different possible ways and degrees" (BT, 183). In the Being of its possibilities, Dasein is essentially temporal. This idea of temporality as the ground of Being and Dasein has been worked out by Heidegger commentators since the appearance of the text. Recently, an attempt has been made to ground a temporal literary hermeneutics upon Being and Time. In his forthcoming Icon and Time, William V. Spanos argues for a return to the primordial sources of literature and reading by a process of understanding based upon the temporal disclosure of discourse. These studies alleviate the necessity for outlining Heidegger's demonstration of the primordiality of temporality. In this context, it is only necessary to suggest how the structure of understanding as the potentiality-for-Being of Dasein is fundamentally temporal. Although Heidegger establishes this in the repetition of the "existential-temporal analysis of Dasein" of Division 2, chapter 4, section 67a, it is already contained in the discussion of "Being-there as understanding," section 31. As possibility, Dasein is not "a free-floating potentiality-forBeing. . . . In every case Dasein, as essentially having a state-of mind, has already got itself into definite possibilities" (BT, 183). 172]

Martin Heidegger Dasein's "past," his "having-been," results from his thrownness (Geworfenheit). Dasein is already always in a world, a situation, to use Sartre's term, which is constituted partly by his o w n possibilities. At the same time as understanding "has" a past or "having-been," as "projection," it "has" a "future," "Why does the understanding," Heidegger asks, "always press forward into possibilities? It is because the understanding has in itself the existential structure which we call 'projection' " (BT, 184-85). This does not mean Dasein conducts itself according to a fixed plan; projection is a stable element of Dasein's structure: "As long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities" (BT, 185). Commenting on this passage, Michael Gelven explains: "This means that to throw before ourselves our own possible ways of existing is an essential characteristic of what we are" (C, 87). Dasein's Being as understanding, that is, as potentiality-for-Being, is defined by its temporal structure: thrownness and futurity. Dasein's third ecstasy, the Present, is discussed in this section as "sight," "a universal term for characterizing any access to entities or to Being, as access in general" (BT, 187). In other words, "sight" is the element in understanding's structure which disposes Dasein toward disclosure. In "sight," "Dasein 'sees' possibilities, in terms of which it is" (BT, 188). But it is not until the repetition of the analysis of Dasein in light of temporality that the idea of "sight" becomes clear as constituting the "Present" ecstasy of Dasein's understanding: "as an authentic Present of waiting-to wards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be 'in a time' as ready-to-hand or presentat-hand" (BT, 388). Thus, understanding is a structure of disclosure. In fact, it is primordial disclosure since it reveals the world, the context of Dasein's existence, and constitutes his possibilities. Whenever Dasein interprets, therefore, whenever it brings what is understood into light, it does so from a position already within the context and limitations of that which it interprets. This is the heart of the hermeneutic circle. The nature of Dasein's under[73J

Martin Heidegger standing as the basic disclosure of the world necessitates that all interpretation which exhibits whatever is understood and explicates whatever is disclosed, must be circular, caught within the realm of what is being interpreted. In other words, it is impossible to escape from the context of world defined by understanding to a standpoint of interpretation which goes beyond being in and o f the material or events being interpreted. A Hegelian claim to see all o f history from the end of its working out, and therefore to understand it "objectively" and "abstractly," founders upon Heidegger's demonstration that the Being of understanding itself prevents such atemporal, infinite knowledge. Heidegger defines interpretation as "the development of the understanding" (BT, 188). In the process of interpretation, the possibilities of what is only preliminarily understood in Verständnis are worked out. Hermeneutics is the way to pass through the veil of hiddenness to the phenomenon, to Being, only because structurally, in intepretation, "the 'world' which has already been understood comes . . . explicidy into the sight which understands" (BT, 189). Dasein is capable of phenomenological destruction only because of the disclosing structure of understanding. But just as phenomenology must be hermeneutical because o f Dasein's potential for inauthenticity, understanding, which is the ground of all acts of disclosure, must find its meaning, its explicitness, in interpretation. In "circumspective concern," Dasein not only understands, but discloses "something as something" (BT, 189). In other words, the hermeneutical-interpretive process of destructive phenomenology reveals and names something by disclosing this something's relationship to or involvement with Dasein because understanding is ontologically completed in its structure by the primordial interpretation o f what a thing that is ready-to-hand "is for" ("es ist zum") (BT, 189). Heidegger labels this function of understanding the "apophantical as": "we are not simply designating something; but that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question" (BT, 201). Our relationship to and involvement with the thing is defined or disclosed in this structure. [74]

Martin Heidegger It is a completion of a potentiality contained in understanding: "That which is disclosed in understanding—that which is understood—is already accessible in such a way that its 'as which' can be made to stand out explicitly. The 'as' makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation" (BT, 189). Interpretation, then, is a fundamental structure of Dasein's understanding; thus, all specific acts of interpretation possess a hermeneutical or phenomenological function. The ontological-existential structure of understanding, of Dasein's primordial Being as potential! ty-forBeing is completed by a structure of what I call primordial interpretation which exhibits, explicates, and reveals the involvement of Dasein with whatever is intuited in understanding. In fact, the primordiality of the interpretive structure in the process of disclosure causes Heidegger seemingly to contradict the major thrust of his argument for the equiprimordiality of understanding and discourse. He suggests at one point that understanding and interpretation are ontologically prior to discourse: "That which is understood gets Articulated when the entity to be understood is brought close interpretatively by taking as our clue the 'something as something'; and this Articulation lies before our making any thematic assertion about it" (BT, 190). The importance to Heidegger's argument of the priority of discourse to interpretation—which I will discuss shortly—is temporarily upset in this statement. Heidegger is clearly preoccupied with the essential nature of interpretation as a primordial element in the larger structure of understanding. The burden of this explication of Heidegger has been to suggest why all interpretive or hermeneutical acts share in the essentially destructive process of the ontological structure of primordial interpretation. The latter, in all cases, as we have seen, completes understanding by drawing out what is incompletely understood and exhibiting it as a possibility of Dasein. In the face of the understanding's potential for hiddenness, for inauthenticity, primordial interpretation explicitly presents understanding with its own possibilities for disclosing. Proceeding from the [75]

Martin Heidegger Constitution of the "world" by the understanding, interpretation clarifies Dasein's fundamental involvement with what is disclosed as in-the-world (BT, 190-91). Just as the hermeneutical method provides the proper way through whatever specifically covers up a phenomenon or truth, primordial interpretation is the passage through the potential for inauthenticity which threatens to cover-over Dasein as disclosedness itself. In effect, primordial interpretation is the necessary process by which Dasein becomes open to the world, authentic, and capable of disclosure, rather than remaining fallen, inauthentic, and in error. Further, all acts of secondary interpretation, of hermeneutics, which are made possible by primary interpretation, necessarily share in the disclosing of a structure charged with preserving the disclosive potential of Dasein itself. Disinterested, distanced, analytic knowledge of an object of interpretation is impossible. Interpretation can only present the working out, the "explicating," not of a text, but of the understanding of a text as a possibility of Dasein. Heidegger explains the nature of this "explication" in his analysis of the "fore-structure" of understanding. Heidegger characterizes this "fore-structure" as a "fore-having" (Vorhabe), "fore-sight" (Vorsicht), and "fore-conception" (Vorgriff) (BT, 191). The "fore-structure" is essentially temporal in nature. The "fore-having" directs an interpreter out of Dasein's past and present while "fore-sight" and "fore-conception," although conditioned by the past, are primarily futural. The "fore-structure" establishes that prior to any act of interpretation, Dasein is in-the-world. Also, because of Dasein's situation, all interpretation emerges out of and toward Dasein's interest in or involvement with those things in-the-world which he intends to interpret. Dasein is necessarily predisposed toward the "object" of his interpretation, thereby making "objective" interpretation impossible. In the "fore-having," Dasein's involvement with things in an entire complex of relationships which compose his environment or world directs interpretation toward those things which Dasein "already" understands: "As the appropriation of under[76]

Martin Heidegger standing, the interpretation operates in Being towards a totality of involvements which is already understood—a Being which understands" (BT, 191). An interpretation can only be the working out of what is understood but not yet appropriated, that is, not yet "unveiled" (BT, 191). This appropriative interpretation unveils "under the guidance of a point of view. . . .[a Vorsicht which] 'takes the first cut' out of what has been taken into our fore-having, and does so with a view to a definite way in which this can be interpreted" (BT, 191). As a result of this fore-sight which directs understanding's movement into the future of interpretation, an object of understanding becomes conceptualizable, authentically (by disclosing something hidden) or inauthentically (by continuing to perpetrate the cover-up): "In either case, the interpretation has already decided for a definite way of conceiving it, either with finality or with reservations: it is grounded in something we grasp in advance—in a fore-conception" (BT, 191). Authentic interpretation cannot escape this fore-structure. Even the process of dis-closure, of dis-covering, must emerge out of the world and a disposition toward the world. Interpretation as a process of stripping away, of performing the phenomenological reduction—that is, of bracketing all the presuppositions of the tradition—itself emerges not f r o m a completely passive, tabula rasa consciousness, but f r o m an active interest, an involved predisposition to unveil totally something which is given only incompletely in understanding. The circular structure of Heidegger's o w n project which I outlined above results from this "fore-structure." Since truth cannot emerge f r o m complete hiddeness, but only f r o m error or semblance, interpretation or hermeneutics can only exhibit what is "intelligible" (verständlich) and not something which is completely foreign and distanced from our possible involvement. " A n interpretation," according to Heidegger's structure of understanding, "is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us." Furthermore, in a passage which certainly greatly influences Paul de Man, Heidegger adds: "If, when one is engaged in a particular concrete kind of interpreta[77]

Martin Heidegger tion, in the sense of exact textual Interpretation, one likes to appeal to what 'stands there,' then one finds that what 'stands there' in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpreting" (BT, 191-92). Therefore, all interpretations are not only destructive, i.e., involved in appropriating through the veil what is understood, but they are circular and themselves based on presuppositions. It is this latter fact which requires the ongoing process of interpretation which needs to be performed "again and again" in the examination of the primordial material contained within the tradition and in the attempt to bring about "a-letheia." Clearly, this fact lies behind de Man's idea of a literary history which would be composed of a series of "mis-readings." They would be "misreadings," of course, because they must each necessarily rest upon an unexamined interpretive presupposition and because they would be, as interpretations, merely "working-out" those presuppositions. Heidegger insists that this structure is not the vicious circle of logic and it would be a mistake to try to somehow escape from the circle. For interpretations to be authentic, these basic conditions must be acknowledged beforehand as essential: "What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way" (BT, 125). This circle contains a possibility for attaining "primordial" knowing. Proper attention to the nature of the "fore-structure," rather than futile, inauthentic attempts to evade it—and consequently the finitude of Dasein's understanding— assures the unique "historiological knowledge" which the hermeneutic circle offers: To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility [for primordial knowledge] only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these forestructures in terms of the things themselves. Because understanding, in accordance with its existential meaning, is Dasein's [78]

Martin Heidegger own potentiality-for-Being, the ontological presuppositions of historiological knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigour held in die most exact sciences. (BT, 195) Although I have already treated some of the historical and historiological implications for Dasein of Heidegger's methods of destruction and interpretation in the context of my discussion of "phenomenology," this fuller account of historical as opposed to the scientific knowledge which structuralists such as Tordorov and Culler as well as the N e w Critics desire, is crucial to m y understanding of literary history. Yet, before I can move to a discussion of this central idea, it is necessary to examine Heidegger's notion of discourse explicitly to show not only that all interpretation is destructive or explicatory, but also that all authentic speech is itself hermeneutical, i.e., disclosing and destructive interpretation, as well. As I have noted above, Heidegger's momentary claim for the priority of understanding and interpretation over that of discourse appears to contradict the major impulse in Being and Time to see logos as legein (Rede) as equiprimordial with understanding when viewed existentially. Heidegger's discussion of discourse indicates a distinction between language and speech. The former "has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein's disclosedness" (BT, 203). In other words, language as a phenomenon is made possible by the potentiality-for-Being which is Dasein's understanding. However, discourse, the logos as Rede, is not language, but rather "the existential-ontological foundation of language." (BT, 203). We have already seen Heidegger, in his discussion of logos, suggest the possibility of identifying legein, discourse, with noein, " 'to be aware of,' 'to know' " (BT, 47). It is by virtue of this identification that logos as the authentic use of language can be distinguished from the inauthentic use of language in idle talk. Discourse is "an existential state in which Dasein is disclosed." It reveals the basic structure of disclosedness of Dasein. Furthermore, discourse articulates or expresses Dasein's state of [79]

Martin Heidegger Being-in-the-world and, as a result, reveals itself to have a "worldly" character itself (BT, 204). Consequently, discourse as speech, as talk, is always "talk about something" (BT, 204). Not merely assertive language is always "about" something, but all discourse, as disclosure of Dasein's relationship to and involvement with the world, is referential: "What the discourse is about is a structural item that it [i.e., discourse] necessarily possesses; for discourse helps to constitute the disclosedness of Being-inthe-world, and in its own structure it is modelled upon this basic state of Dasein" (BT, 205). Dasein, however, does not find itself in a world, nor does it create its own world, by "talking about" and "naming" things which it finds "out-there." Rather, discourse as "ex-pression," has the form of articulating Dasein's "Being-outside" (BT, 205). Rede, that is, expresses the nondualistic, non-Cartesian nature of Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Speech does not bring man into relation with the world. It does not "overcome" the split between the mental and the natural—a split which, of course, totally motivates Harold Bloom's misreadings. "In talking, Dasein expresses itself [spricht sich . . . aus] not because it has, in the first instance, been encapsulated as something 'internal' over against something outside, but because as Being-in-the-world it is already 'outside' when it understands" (BT, 205). Thus, all language, as discourse, speaks already within the world, within a context of involvements which in fact it discloses. The opposition between language and nature which Bloom sees as the motivating cause of poetic anxiety is reduced to a fiction by Heidegger's analysis of discourse. In fact, as I have tried to suggest in my rhetorical analysis of his works, the "anxiety of influence" stems from the conflict between a poet's desire to use language authentically, i.e., discursively, to reveal the structure of Dasein's involvements with his world, while being restricted in the process by the sedimentation of language which has occurred in the reification of "idle talk" into tradition. The import of Heidegger's theory of discourse lies in the essentially authentic use of language to disclose by destroying or [80]

Martin Heidegger overcoming "idle talk." Yet, discourse need not be speech in order to be authentic. Ultimately, discourse need not even involve language as any "totality of words" (BT, 204). Discourse comes to be seen as an element in Dasein's structure of disclosure upon which all language is based, but which is not necessarily itself linguistic. Perhaps, put most extremely, it could be said that "discourse" is authentic language, cutting away the veils screening the involvement of Dasein with the World as well as the language of the tradition which has for so long obscured the priority of the Being-question and other "phenomena" which are "true." Heidegger explicitly recognizes that one of the possible achievements of his theory of understanding and discourse is "the necessity of reestablishing the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial" (BT, 209). He is criticizing both the solidification of language into meaning and the solidification of its rules into grammar as this is brought about by the misinterpretation of logos as " 'logic' " (BT, 209). This criticism is of utmost importance to m y argument. Heidegger's retrieve of the logos as Rede from the tradition of ratio is partially intended to re-found, to re-discover the potentialities of a language which would rest upon a "positive understanding of the basic a priori structure of discourse" (BT, 209). Such renewal is necessary because it would free language from its "error" of assertion (Aussage). The latter, of course, is a derivative mode of language which congeals the discovery of discourse into the utilitarian form of the proposition, which, in its turn, in its Beingpresent-at-hand, is an instrument of the technological mind. Heidegger sees the entire tradition of language theory and language usage as defined by the Greeks' notion of logos as assertion. O f course, this misinterpretation of language brings about the forgetfulness of Being, the hiddenness of truth, and the cover-up of the primordial temporality of Dasein. Therefore, when Heidegger begins his project, he is confronted by a language which itself contains not only the history of all past disclosures, but which itself is the instrument of their cover-up. His problem is to get through the veil which the very 1811

Martin Heidegger usage of language drawn f r o m the tradition will superimpose u p o n the disclosures he is attempting by his "re-membrance" of Being. As a result, of course, he breaks radically with traditional philosophical language. Yet, his etymological analyses and his verbal pyrotechnics revivify some of the petrified issues which lie concealed behind long-unexamined and habitually misused terms. "Logos" is the classic example of Heidegger's verbal destruction in Being and Time. At the end of his second "Introduction," Heidegger in fact announces to his readers that the "awkwardness" of his prose is purposeful and meaningful: "it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task w e lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ' g r a m m a r ' " (BT, 63). In historical attempts at ontology, the Greeks were compelled to impose "formulations" of an "altogether unprecedented character" upon the language (BT, 63). In other words, there is historical justification for his own attempt to retrieve language f r o m the grammar of logic which has elevated the petrifying assertion to the pinnacle of philosophical meaning. By laying bare the ontological structure of truth and understanding, Heidegger undercuts the priority of the logos as ratio, i.e., what the tradition thinks of as the condition for the possibility of disclosure, "reason" itself, and, by his discussion of discourse as constituent of Dasein's disclosedness, Heidegger also shows "assertion" to be itself a derivative f o r m of language. But in his o w n project, Heidegger works through the language of the tradition to break it d o w n and to reveal what it has concealed about itself and Being. In the process, he discloses the possibility for the condition of an authentic, nontraditional language, the structure of Dasein's disclosedness. Thus, his attempt to uncover the question of Being through a nontraditional language has actually disclosed the reasons why his attempt is valid. T h r o u g h discourse and understanding, a positive grammar of language as uncovering, as destruction, as interpretation, be[82]

Martin Heidegger comes a necessity. The language of assertion, which rests upon the possibility of "objective" understanding, is completely overthrown by the hermeneutical structure of understanding. Dasein cannot stand off at a distance, detached f r o m whatever he does, thinks about, lives with, or studies. His basic constitution as Being-in-the-world, disclosed by understanding, involves him immediately in a complex relationship with whatever he studies and lives with. Once reminded of the roots of language, one can proceed to uncover, to disclose, to maintain, and to communicate without necessarily falling into the trap of formalization and logic. For the literary critic, such as Paul de Man, certain writers perform the function of disclosure which discourse as an ontologica! structure of Dasein makes possible. Discourse must be seen as the condition for the possibility of all authentic language. What Heidegger reveals is that language contains the possibility for uncovering at all times, just as it can be idle talk for the most part. Language can proceed from logos as discourse or aletheia to reveal what tradition, habit, and inauthenticity cover-up for the most part. Furthermore, as Heidegger's own retrieves indicate, many writers and thinkers participate in the structure of disclosure to greater and lesser extents. Kant, for example, "discloses" the temporal ground of Dasein, although proximally and for the most part, he is unaware of the position his language—as the potential for truth—reveals. His understanding and primordial interpretation as structures of disclosure constitute the insight he, as fallen, cannot articulate fully. Although Heidegger's destruction, i.e., his interpretation, is necessary to allow Kant's discovery to emerge explicitly, the revelation is essentially that of Kant's language. The insights gained by this examination of Heidegger's theory of logos can n o w be summarized. The structure of Dasein's disclosedness as potentiality-for-Being grounds the entire complex of disclosure which is composed of aletheia, destruction, phenomenology, and interpretation. Yet, the potentiality to un[83]

Martin Heidegger cover is always and for the most part itself covered over by Dasein's inauthenticity. But tradition and habits cannot completely obscure truth since understanding, as constituent of the world, always, to some degree, is aware of the Being of entities and of Dasein. Two crucial ideas for literary interpretation and literary history emerge from this discussion to support my original proposition that literary texts are themselves interpretations. All language is capable of authenticity and inauthenticity, i.e., it both discloses and covers up, often in the same movement. Therefore, for language to maintain what has been disclosed in a state of openness, it must itself be kept from solidifying into idle talk or "tradition" by the process of destruction. All authentic language reflects this destructive process. Criticism of literary language, insofar as it is authentic, must be aware of this interpretive process within the language being studied. Authentic, destructive language opens up those forms, ideas, and tropes which lie within the earlier texts of the tradition. Moreover, literary history itself, as I have suggested in my discussion of de Man in chapter one, if it intends to be authentic, must be cognizant that there is ongoing hermeneutical interaction within and among literary texts to maintain what has been disclosed, and they must recognize that "history" and historiological knowledge are the record of this necessary, unending interpretation. Dasein's potential for this type of interpretation lies in the temporal structure of his understanding, his "relatedness backward and forward." It makes possible a look at the tradition which tries to redeem the issues, the problems, from their hibernation in the idle talk of habit. In fact, to this point, my analysis has been directed toward showing that Heidegger's theory of understanding realizes that all authentic language potentially reveals truth by destroying what obscures it. Now, however, it is necessary to deal with his ideas of repetition, retrieve, and history to defend the model of literary history which I am suggesting is more vital and valuable than the genealogical and positivistic models of so much Modern criticism. [84]

Martin Heidegger III There is a fairly extensive literature dealing with the relationship of Heidegger's theory of history and his own model of historical interpretation in Being and Time and other works. 11 I intend to extend the conclusions of some of these theories to the area of literary history. The problem for the literary critic is this: how does an individual work stand in relation to the "tradition"? There is a strong sense that this problem needs to be dealt with, and I have tried to suggest some of the reasons why a few of the more important recent attempts are only partially successful. As Paul de Man's essay on "Literary History and Literary Modernity" suggests, the claim by contemporary writers to be doing something "new" and "different" is a universal claim of all literature and is always counterbalanced by the necessary relationship to the past in which every text stands by definition of being linguistic. Slavish imitation of the "tradition," of course, leads to conscious and unconscious parody (Bloom offers Pynchon as an example of the former and Mailer of the latter), and as Bloom suggests, sterility, loss of value, and the death of literature. Because Dasein, and especially the artist, stands already within a world and within a tradition, he cannot act independently of it. Certainly, Modern and Postmodern writers, though, have been trying to get completely beyond what they see as the deadening habits of thought, perception, and writing which define the "western" mind since the Renaissance. Some critics, like de Man and Derrida, are aware of the difficulty of this effort and some major writers, such as Whitman, Stevens, and Olson, are prepared to admit that the tradition must somehow be re-begun and made to "work" once again in a kind of Kierkegaardian repetition, since it cannot, in fact, be evaded. How, though, can this be done? How can the horrors Bloom so rightly fears be avoided? Even more importantly, how can literature regain the vitality and meaning which it always possesses as a possibility by virtue of its linguistic existence? The inability to escape from the tradition which Heidegger [85]

Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche both sense is paradoxically the key to answering these various questions. This " e n t r a p m e n t " is what Heidegger calls the hermeneu tic situation. Calvin O . Schräg defines this situation in historical terms: In seeking to understand the history of metaphysics we are involved in interpretation. But in every work of interpretation the interpreter, with his questions and intentions, is already positioned within his data. He operates within a hermeneutical situation, and his understanding is conditioned by this situation. This situationality of always already operating within a context of given, although provisional, meanings is what keeps the interpreter within the history of that which he interprets. The interpreter is himself historical. He is denied the unconditioned freedom to stand outside of history so as to make a judgement on it. This leads us to a rejection of the Hegelian claim that one can place oneself at the end of history and speak from the standpoint of a disembodied logos. 12 T h u s the writer in using language is already and always within the world and the tradition constituted by that very language. This explains w h y the m o d e r n impulse to be antitraditional is always defined by its position within the tradition. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T . S . Eliot insists that poetry cannot be trapped within mere " n o v e l t y , " (which de Man calls fashion), or mere imitation. " T r a d i t i o n , " Eliot says, "is a matter of much wider significance." Although Eliot's insistence that every n e w w o r k of art is not only informed by the tradition, but actually modifies "the whole existing o r d e r , " is a step toward understanding the relationship of each n e w work to the tradition f r o m which it emerges, his claim that tradition might be seen as an ideal and timeless order is not justifiable. 1 3 Indeed, that all authentic texts exist in a state of flux and of unstable, destructive, intertextual relationships disrupts both any linearly successive and organically integral images of order. Heidegger's theory insists upon the historicity of the tradition and its interpreter. Neither one is a privileged unchanging center or firm point of reference for the interpretive act. All [86]

Martin Heidegger linguistic texts share to some degree in the interpretive, disclosing structure of the logos, in the potentiality for truth and error, and thus in a mixed relationship to other disclosures and coverups which precede and follow them. Once again, this suggests the change and risk which a fully temporal and hermeneutic theory of literary interpretation and history brings to the study of literature. Yet, it does not require the gloom and despair which brings Bloom to deny the future potential of literature. Indeed, this situation, fraught with possibilities, opening up language and literature to potential change, and perhaps even disorder, becomes the basis of poetry's future: " O u r hermeneutical situationality is not a matter of fatalistic determination. It is layered with possibility, temporalized in such a manner that it projects the openness of the future as it recollects the destiny of the past." 1 4 " T h e openness of the future" is the central human fact of this sort of literary history. Within the hermeneutical situation the poet can destroy the history of literary interpretations, of literary texts as such, as well as the habitual-critical interpretations of those texts. This means he can reclaim for human possibility those potential problems and issues which are lost in the systematization of Dasein's disclosures in past language. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger explains the orientation toward the ontotheological-metaphysical tradition which his o w n interpretations, his o w n writings, assume: It is true that in order to wrest from the actual words that which these words "intend to say," every interpretation must necessarily resort to violence. This violence, however, should not be confused with an action that is wholly arbitrary. The interpretation must be animated and guided by the power of an illuminative idea. Only through the power of this idea can an interpretation risk that which is always audacious, namely, entrusting itself to the secret élan of a work, in order by this élan to get through to the unsaid and to attempt to find an expression for it. The directive idea itself is confirmed by its own power of illumination.15 [87]

Martin Heidegger Heidegger goes on to describe this method of close destruction o f a previous text in order to express what its language "intended to say," a repetition (KPM, 208). O f course, as William V. Spanos suggests, Heidegger's idea of repetition as destruction emerges from Kierkegaard's earlier treatment of the same idea. 1 6 For the Danish philosopher, it is a movement based soundly on the incarnational paradox, while for Heidegger, it stands forth from the secular analysis of Dasein's understanding. In this context of ongoing interpretation, Heidegger's definition is of more immediate importance: By a repetition of a fundamental problem we understand the disclosure of the primordial possibilities concealed in it. The development of these possibilities [in an interpretation ] has the effect of transforming the problem and thus preserving it in its import as a problem. To preserve a problem means to free and to safeguard its intrinsic powers, which are the source of its essence and which make it possible as a problem. (KPM, 211). This general program of repeating the traditional "problems" in such a way as to regain their authentic Being as issues is known as the "retrieve." Programmatically, the "retrieve" must regain all the fundamental experiences which motivate the problems o f the tradition and exhibit them as such in order to find a new beginning. The retrieve does not nostalgically hope to return to some lost beginning, some mythic ilio tempore, but to displace that beginning and to establish another: This means nothing less than to re-trieve the beginning of our historical-spiritual Dasein in order to transmute it into another beginning. This is possible. It is indeed the crucial form of history because it takes its start in the ground occurrence. But a beginning is not retrieved by reducing it to something past and now known and merely to be imitated. The beginning must be begun again, more originally, with all the strangeness, darkness, and insecurity that a true beginning brings with it. Retrieve as we understand it is anything but a better way of continuing the past by the methods of the past.17 [88]

Martín Heidegger In fact, Modern and Postmodern writing, in its antipathy for traditional ways and ideas, tries repeatedly to start over. Yet, these attempts are generally defined by their relation to the past. Particular writers—like those dealt with in this study—Whitman, Stevens, and Olson—in fact adopt the specific method of retrieve which Heidegger suggests here. They break open the traditional poetic models which obscure the vital sources of their art, a possibility for poetry which de Man is reluctant to admit. Wallace Stevens, for example, employs the form of romantic quest against itself, not merely to destroy it by describing its "inadequacy" to the Modern world, but to reveal what it obscures, what, as a form, it "intends to say" and could not. In Whitman and Olson, the fracturing of the line of English verse is another example of destroying the literary tradition for the purposes of beginning again—as Heidegger hopes—by allowing the potential, the possibility, of language to exhibit itself as such writers actively explore its "sites," its "occasions." The possibility and potential value of this type of retrieve lies within the temporal structure of Dasein. Dasein's understanding is essentially temporal and Heidegger derives the three "ecstasies" which constitute this temporality from Dasein's disclosedness, that is, his "relatedness backward and forward," his simultaneous structure of "having been," of the now, and of futurity. Dasein is not an entity with a "life span" completed between the poles of beginning and end (BT, 426). As Thomas Langan puts it when commenting on the unique temporal structure of Dasein: In the full "now" of authentic existence, all projections are made in view of my radical thrownness, with death before me as the ultimate conditioning possibility, so that existence becomes a self-extension from birth to death lived in the dense moment of caring projection. Because the Dasein knows the course it is taking and resolutely wills it, the historical motion is not a passive undergoing, such as the material living thing experiences, but an active "letting itself happen," the free shouldering of a destiny. For this reason Heidegger terms the [89|

Martin Heidegger motion of Dasein's self-extension a Geschehen—a "happening," from which of course he would derive the word Geschichte (historical destiny). (ΜΗ, 57) It is precisely this temporal structure which differentiates the m o d e l and value of the literary history I a m proposing f r o m the traditional positivistic, structuralist, N e w Critical, and B l o o m i a n theories. Dasein is both f o r w a r d and b a c k w a r d , looking at all times, in all n o w s ; in fact, b o t h orientations are determined by Dasein's projection i n t o possibility, i n t o change, into time itself. Bate reduces the past to ideal orders which can never be radically c h a n g e d . A l o n g w i t h B l o o m , his " p a s t " is defined by continuity and stability. Yet Dasein's o w n structure, his o w n Being is p o tentiality, possibility, which, although it emerges out of a situation, or rather, because it is g r o u n d e d in existence, looks authentically back t o its past to find n e w possibilities for a n e w b e g i n n i n g , which have either been f o r g o t t e n or never exhibited in interpretation. T h e look b a c k w a r d , t h o u g h , is always simultaneously a look f o r w a r d , t o w a r d the actualization of these possibilities in a m o r e authentic—and that means m o r e open and less forgetful— tradition. O n c e again, Langan's c o m m e n t s on the theory of repetition are i m p o r t a n t : "Repetition, the act of m a k i n g present the possibilities of the past in view of [Dasein's] resolute projections, is the basis of 'handing on a tradition,' which is w h a t occurs w h e n I actualize historical possibility on the basis of w h a t has been d o n e , and thus m a k e possible n e w advances for the f u t u r e " (.ΜΗ, 59). T h e need to preserve what is disclosed is an o n g o i n g process and its renewal requires viewing the past in terms of the f u t u r e . T h i s does n o t mean coercing the past or imposing " m o d e r n " theories u p o n it; rather, it implies allowing the past to define itself, allowing the interpreter to see in the light of w h a t H e i d e g g e r calls a text's " é l a n , " so that the intention of past language—its potential—can be constantly renewed. Insofar as language is used authentically in literature—and it can never be completely authentic since, as w e have seen, logos is b o t h dis[90]

Martin Heidegger course and idle talk—literary history is a series of interpretations of what has preceded in the light of what are freely seized as f u ture possibilities. In the tradition, the solidification of the language which made the "original" disclosures obscures the sources for the most part, and language's habitual forms need to be overcome. The severity of Postmodern and M o d e r n destruction does not, however, obscure the potential for disclosure which exists in all language and specifically in antitraditional writers like Swift and Sterne. This theory presents us with a model of interpretation which is more explicit than the one suggested by de M a n in Blindness and Insight. It recognizes the temporal orientations of many writers as destructive stances. It requires a practical criticism which involves the critic in dealing with texts which are themselves often in need of interpretation, of destruction, and which are, to the degree that they are authentic, interpretations of their o w n tradition as well. Authentic criticism, then, is no longer merely the analysis of one text as a closed system, or of one poet in terms of his "formative biographical influences," nor even of his psychological attempts to be his o w n father, a Gnostic out of time, but an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation, and so on "again and again." Finally, such a process leads the authentic critic back in his o w n history of interpretations— which, of course, are themselves destructive interpretations as all authentic histories probably must be—to a Nothing. Clearly de Man senses this in his o w n work as well as in his reading of Heidegger. " T o put it simply," as Theodore Kisiel says in his introduction to Werner Marx's Heidegger and the Tradition, "the backtrack that attempts to get to the b o t t o m of things ultimately reaches a point where the b o t t o m falls out, and all that can be said is es gibt: 'there is a giving.' " 1 8 When Derrida "defines" la différance as the ground of all conceptualization, as the possibility of thought and discovery, he certainly alludes to Heidegger's demonstration that at the origin, the fundamental center, there is only Nothing, the withdrawal of Being which marks the ontologica! difference between Being and beings. [91]

Martin Heidegger Ultimately, then, there emerges a theory of literature which sees all language as based on nothing and manifesting itself as fiction emerging out of and reflecting nothing. Insofar as it pretends to special freedom from error, it is inauthentic. De Man "erred" precisely by claiming absolute démystification for literary texts. All language has a dual potential because it emerges from the Nothing and Being of the source of all interpretations. The "es gibt" makes possible conceptualization and idle talk; it enables both tradition as mishnah and tradition which no longer " w o r k s . " Authentic critical interpretation confronts this constant destructive shifting among truths and errors with no hope at all of making sense of it all. It cannot be straightened out or closed off. As Heidegger says of the hermeneutic circle, it cannot be avoided, only gotten into in the right way. Fundamentally, this means recognizing the existence of the permanent hermeneutical situation and allowing it to inform the practical acts of interpretation which a critic performs. If literary interpretation is to be realized as an authentic possibility and not merely an abstraction, destruction must be employed in practice, in the process of disclosing the very interpretive impulses of poets of undoubted authenticity. Following my destruction of the inauthentic method of the N e w Criticism, the chapters on Whitman, Stevens, and Olson will attempt to do just that.

[ 9 2 J

Chapter Three

Cleanth Brooks and Modern Irony: A Kierkegaardian Critique

In an attempt to deal with the problems of temporality and the tradition which contemporary literature raises with such violence and insistence, critics who are authentically responsive to this material have attempted theories of literature and criticism with the assumption that the New Criticism has come to an end. Yet, New Critics of the second and third generation still influence the study of literature in the universities of the United States. Often these teachers and scholars were trained by other devoted New Critics, fresh from the battles to establish the primacy of the literary text over the life of the poet and general cultural history in the study of literature. As a result of the success of these defenders, the New Criticism has become pervasive. It has become an unreflective set of critical habits rather than principles, which coerces the reading processes of those who have been trained in colleges and universities. Even though the New Criticism has been declared dead and buried many times in the last ten or fifteen years, it effects education and research in literature even at advanced levels with such a tenacity and stubbornness that many of its practitioners are no longer aware that they are, in fact, employing a method, and certainly they do not suspect what the implications of that method might be. The New Criticism also has provided a terrain suitable for the introduction of French structuralism and poststructuralism [93]

Cleanth Brooks into the United States. The proliferation of major journals and of important books in these fields in the last five years suggests that the much more technical and precise language of the structuralists and poststructuralists is not at all inimical to the New Criticism. A destruction of the New Criticism might, by opening up the metaphysical assumptions underlying it, suggest some of the reasons why the structuralists and poststructuralists have been welcomed in the American academy. Also, there might appear in the process some idea of how a destruction of structuralism itself—which is perhaps only the newest version of the New Criticism—could proceed. Bate and Bloom begin with the assumption that the New Criticism is dead, but they do not bother to analyze what it obscures or what it assumes because the theories which they propose are not meaningful departures from the larger tradition of metaphysical aestheticism which subsumes the New Criticism. Indeed, like Brooks, Ransom, and Tate, they use literature as a bulwark against nothingness in an attempt to recover a lost paradise in the "fall" into historical existence. De Man is aware of the refusal of Modern criticism to recognize the essential nothingness at the "center" of all literature and he certainly reveals the weakness of any criticism which does not attempt to take the basic "fact" of nothingness into account as a permanent feature of all critical writing. Yet, de Man does not perform the radical destruction of the New Criticism which is necessary. His discussion of American formalism fails to bring out both its atemporal assumptions and its basically metaphysical nature. He does not expose how the New Criticism as cover-up of time, the absurd, and finitude, of nothingness, Being, and the world is a continuation of the inauthentic tradition which Heidegger recognizes as the primary blocking agent to thinking about truth. A destruction of the New Criticism along these lines would also suggest why it resists so much contemporary literature which insists precisely upon finitude, absurdity, nothingness, and the world. Furthermore, since the American "tradition" in poetry is defined essentially by a destructive relationship to the forms of [94]

Cleanth Brooks the past European tradition, the N e w Criticism emerges as inauthentic especially in the context of those poets treated in the second half of this study. Indeed, the N e w Criticism, in its various manifestations—the rigorous verbal analysis of Brooks and Warren, the more catholic but equally reactionary insight of Tate, or the Adamic, neo-Kantian theories of R.W.B. Lewis and other theoreticians of American mythology—is exactly the cover-up which the metaphysical tradition perpetrates to obscure the poetry of destruction itself. The N e w Criticism, in its extreme denial of stature to Whitman and Olson (as well as many others like Lawrence and Williams), and in its reduction of Stevens to an accountant of the imagination, hides the poetry which threatens its metaphysical self-interest, i.e., its desire to use literature and the academy as a way out of historical time into a world of eternity and timeless truths. These poets can be used to destroy the N e w Critical interpretations which have grown up around them and reduced them to habits of our culture. In other words, it is possible to reveal what the N e w Criticism conceals in individual poems by turning those texts against the "standard readings" of them. But a more radical examination of the N e w Criticism's a prions is needed to disclose the dehumanized N e w Critical stance toward poetry as a metaphysical stance which inauthentically covers-up.

II Irony is, of course, the most pervasive category of Cleanth Brook's criticism, and it shares along with Burke's "paradox" and Empson's "ambiguity" a position so dominant in modern literary study that to question it is to question the best practical criticism and much of the best critical theorizing of this century. Nonetheless, the time for reevaluating Modernism's ironic stance is overdue. During the 1960s, critics such as Nathan A. Scott, Jr., J. Hillis Miller, Frank Kermode, and later in the decade, William [95]

Cleanth Brooks V. Spanos, called for a critical discourse which would be open to the thematic nightmare of Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, and Beckett in a way which the highly disinterested language of "ambiguity," "paradox," and "irony" is not. 1 Most importantly, these critics searched for a concept of form to replace the "verbal icon," just as the nontraditional, open nature of what is called "destructive" or "deconstructive" anti-art had replaced the classical closed forms—the concrete universale—of such modern poems as "In a Station of the Metro," "Musée des beaux arts," "Lord Weary's Castle," and Empson's "Arachne." At the same time that this critical dissatisfaction was beginning to emerge, the unsympathetic response of New Critically dominated universities and journals to the works of poets like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Sylvia Plath, and others revealed that the New Critics were unable to understand this postmodern poetry because it is modelled upon nonironic poets like Whitman, Lawrence, and W. C. Williams, whom Eliot and Brooks had designated as anathema to the "tradition" and, therefore, to academic study. 2 These new poets returned to sources of poetic vitality forgotten by the "tradition," and they let the possibilities of a nonsymbolist, immanental poetry—that is, one which shows that man and nature are inextricably united and that man is an object in nature—emerge from within the hardened, sedimented New Critical interpretation of Modernism, thereby not only destroying the "tradition" but also letting these poets be heard. I intend to restrict myself in this essay to a study of Brooks, not only because to include Empson, Burke, Tate, Ransom, and all the others consciously or unconsciously associated with the New Critical attitude would require a much longer essay to satisfactorily discriminate among their various theories, but also because Brooks is both paradigmatic of much of what is now called "Modernism" and is perhaps its ablest critical representative. Because irony is the "center" of the New Criticism, any destruction of its discourse or of its interpretation of Modernism must begin by rethinking the "center" in an attempt to displace it. Also, because irony has become habitual—part of what Hus[96]

Cleanth Brooks seri would call the "natural attitude"—among practical and evaluative critics both as a kind of structure necessary to all poems and as a criterion for judging " g o o d " poetry, it is crucial to reduce irony, to lay bare its unexamined assumptions, and to make clear to those who employ it and defend it as necessary to literary discourse exactly what is at stake in the " g a m e " they have chosen to play. It is necessary to begin by placing Brooks in his historical context for two reasons: first, to show how his version of the N e w Criticism exemplifies the modern temperament as a turning to the aesthetic as a means to what I shall call "absolute freed o m " 3 and as a movement away from time, finitude, and the world; second, to make clear the nature of his own view of his historical situation. The latter is of primary importance in understanding irony. Since, as Heidegger argues, all interpretation and discourse is radically temporal and is made possible by the historicity of Dasein, an interpretation of irony must emerge from its "source" in the "times" of both Brook's texts and of my critique of them. M y historical awareness of recent public events in literature and criticism is the condition for the possibility of my destroying Brooks's "irony"; analogously, Brooks's own awareness of and relationship to his dominant actuality—scienticism, historicism, and positivism—alone makes possible what I shall call his pervasively ironic stance. According to Brooks's interpretation of his historical situation, the modern age is defined by naturalistic science, by positivism, and by causal history. This world view imbues not only science, but also education, economics, and even poetry. It demythologizes superstition and Christianity and it destroys the idea of analogy and correspondence, upon which the unified sensibility rests. It replaces faith in God with faith in the machine and in progress—unending repetitive change. Its factories reduce the complex phenomenon, man, to a being functioning in only one direction, to one end, suppressing all that seems irrelevant, to the particular purpose for which he acts. Thus, positivistic science and historical naturalism simplify [97 \

Cleanth Brooks human experience, render it deterministic by virtue of the law of causality, and dissociate the human sensibility. T. E. Hulme, who is a major influence upon the New Critics and Brooks through Pound and Eliot, writes in his commentary on Bergson that positivistic historians reduce history to an "extensive manifold," that is, to a sequence of abstract counters, related causally, which proceed from a definite beginning to a predictable conclusion. 4 Allan Tate echoes Hulme, and is quoted by Brooks, when he describes the naturalistic view of history as a "logical series" which is " 'quantitative, the abstraction of space.' " This "natural" conception of time as an external phenomenon consisting of discrete units causally and logically related is, of course, exactly what Bergson in Time and Free Will calls the "spatialization of time." 5 As Tate goes on to say, in such a theory of time, " 'The past becomes a causal series, and timeless,' " reducing history to an agent of utility. Thus, the natural view of time "suggests 'an omnipotent human rationality' " capable of fixing the past in an irreducible, unchanging, logical order. 6 This causal abstract progression results in historical determinism and in the ultimate achievement of absolute control over man and nature through scientific predictability and technological progress. Man is "caught" 7 within the limitations of a historical period, in an irreversible history which painfully limits human freedom and restricts human aspirations toward any Ideal or Absolute. Science achieves this coercion of man and nature by first coercing thought and language. It imposes the linear form of pure logic on the mind and it drives language into propositional form. As a result, experience is "perceived" on the basis of and as having the shape of the propositional form of the declarative sentence, which is itself structured by the "logical" form of subject and predicate. In expository prose, propositions are related logically, and the mind following the argument moves inexorably from one "position" or "counter" to the next until the conclusion is reached. This mode of discourse mirrors the "extensive manifold's" causal progression [98]

Cleanth Brooks of objects in an abstract series and thus reflects the mind which orders the positivistic, mechanistic world picture. Since no single proposition can amend or qualify its own statement or contain its own negation, propositional form is seen by modern critics as a simplification of experience, as an abstraction which does not reflect the complex and often contradictory world. That is, the Moderns see the proposition as a linear, nonhieroglyphic, unironic distortion of language's ability to reflect complex experiences. Under the impact of the "new science," according to Brooks's historical interpretation, poets and critics, beginning with Hobbes, admit the priority of the propositional form of language and see metaphor and other nonlogical verbal forms as only the embellishment of statement. This admission results in a separation of form and content, of essence and phenomenon; it is a fall f r o m the "unified sensibility" of Dante and Donne, both of whom see the unitary nature of metaphor and its value in conveying the poet's attitude toward his subject. In ironic or contextualist poetry and criticism, meaning is not a result of statement, but of a metaphoric complex of verbal relationships and qualifications, existing on the page. These linguistic patterns alone create and convey meaning appropriate to the complexity and order of the ironist's vision. In traditional theories on the metaphor, Brooks argues, "There is no need for an ironical function—for imagery which will do other than ennoble" (MP, 28-29). Such theories support the dissociation of sensibility. The new science compartmentalizes the mind, "separating into neat categories the emotional and frivolous, the dignified and the mean, the 'poetic' and the 'non-poetic'. . . . The tendency of the [Restoration and Neo-Classical] period toward order . . . tended to remove the conflict of opposites which is the very life of metaphysical poetry" (MP, 31). While the "Hobbesian poet tended to substitute the rational act of sorting out the discordant and removing it from the context," metaphysical and modern poets—that is, ironic poets of context—fuse what in "ordinary experience is [99]

Cleanth Brooks inharmonious" (MP, 34). 8 For the positivist, according to Brooks, the universe is ordered on a progressive model and the primary human faculty is reason; for the authentic poet, the world is ordered by analogy and the primary human faculty is imagination: "Insisting upon imaginative unity, he refuses to depend upon non-imaginative classifications, those of science or logic" (MP, 43). Modern poetry and the N e w Criticism attempt to replace this logic of concepts with a "logic of imagination," to use Eliot's phrase. 9 In "Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry," Brooks defines irony as the "obvious warping or modification of a statement by the context" (IIP, 232). Furthermore, he asserts: "The relation between the parts of a poem—even of a simple lyric—is often intricate, and it is always important. Each part—image, statement, metaphor— helps build the meaning and is itself qualified by the whole context" (IIP, 237). This definition assigns a unique cognitive and human value to poetry. By creating a complexity which results from the ironic qualifications of context, the ironic poem not only supersedes the limitations of a logical order of perception but also goes beyond a vision of actuality defined solely by causal science. Only poetry which is contextual, that is, ironic, is able to deal completely with and "represent" the manifold complexity of human experience. In place of the simplifying scientific worldview, the poet puts the complex, analogic vision of a pervasive ironist. It is, of course, well known that the "great originals" for Brook's theory of synthesis and complexity are Donne and the Coleridge of the fourteenth chapter of the Biographia.10 Brooks finds in " T h e Cannonization" the kind of poetry which demands of the critics a recognition of the imagination's autonomy and of its superiority to reason. In the poem, the seeming opposition between love and religion is really nonexistent. Although these t w o concepts are contradictory to the strict rationalist, Donne builds the poem on the paradox. As Brooks says, modern man, "habituated as he is to an easy yes or no," is uncomfortable with [100]

Cleanth Brooks a situation which does not fit his predetermined categories of positivistic experience. As a result, He refuses to accept the paradox as a serious rhetorical device; and since he is able to accept it only as a cheap trick, he is forced into this dilemma. Either: Donne does not take love seriously; here he is merely sharpening his wit as a sort of mechanical enterprise. Or: Donne does not take religion seriously; here he is merely indulging in a cynical and bawdy parody. (Urn, 11) Brooks hypothesizes that biographical and historical critics are forced by the principle of noncontradiction to exclude the seemingly contradictory; his own explication of "The Cannonization" shows, however, that poems are not organized upon a logical basis. Donne's poem is built upon a structure which transcends the limits of logic by accepting contradictions, and Brooks's analysis of it demonstrates the complexity of a poetic mode of apprehension and organization which is not hampered by the a priori categories of a simplifying system external to the experience. Thus, Brooks not only offers an alternative to progressive, linear structure, causality, and chronology, but he also destroys them by annihilating their linguistic equivalents and verbal structures, the proposition and paragraph. Analogously, Brooks's reading of Coleridge's theory of the synthetic imagination which yokes incongruities into a harmonious whole provides a description of a method of ordering experience which is an alternative to the extensive manifold. Since the unified sensibility is built on correspondence and not on logic, metaphor, which joins opposites on the basis of analogy, can help create a unified picture of the world which is more complex than that offered by science (Urn, 248). Ironic metaphor— paradox and ambiguity—can incorporate complexities and contradictions into an analogic order beyond the limits of systematic thought. When made complex enough, as in Yeats's A Vision or Eliot's The Waste Land, it can include and reconcile the total [101]

Cleanth Brooks complexity of history and can d o it without the abstract fragmentation of linear sequence, without the succession of parts in time. For Brooks, poetry is an alternative to science only by virtue of irony. By allowing relationships between parts which are not causal, it permits no unqualified statement. In the verbal mosaic of the poem, irony qualifies each part, every statement, image, and metaphor. Thus, Brooks denies the modern positivisticnaturalistic stance of his age for a m o r e spiritual Absolute which is an Image of life, which is as complex as life, and which is perfectly harmonized by the ironic context of language: It is not enough for the poet to analyse his experience as the scientist does, breaking it up into parts. . . . His task is finally to unify experience as man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality. (URN, 212-13) T h e ironic poem reestablishes the unity of experience lost in the seventeenth century's "dissociation of sensibility." When the poet returns to the "tradition" of Donne, he acknowledges the complexity of experience: " T h e poet attempts to fuse the conflicting elements in a harmonious whole" [MP, 37; see 43). N o t only does this theory of poetry and complexity overcome, for Brooks, the "dissociation of sensibility" and the fraudulent, coercive simplifications of science, but it achieves for the ironist, poet or reader, aesthetic and psychological freedom from causality and, hence, f r o m determinism. In a poem structured on qualifying irony, no part has chronological priority, except in the most crude sense of visual encounter with the signs. There is no hierarchy of value among parts. There is no "beginning," no "origin," f r o m which all else must follow. 1 1 Irony dictates that each part is a beginning simultaneously with every other part. T h e poem must be read reflexively so that the patterns of all the contextual interrelationships can be seen synchronically. T h e absence of arché and of progression thus lifts the ironist above the traps of the extensive manifold. Experiencing the ironic m o d e of [102]

Cleanth Brooks organization frees the poet or reader from the causal ordering of the world, " f r o m the constraint imposed upon him by the continuity of life." 1 2 In fact, in his M.A. thesis, The Concept of Irony, Seren Kierkegaard recognizes this liberation as the foremost aesthetic and psychological aspect of the ironic vision: But the outstanding feature of irony . . . is the subjective freedom which has at every moment the possibility of a beginning and is not generated from previous conditions. There is something seductive about every beginning because the subject is still free, and this is the sadsfactíon the ironist longs for. At such moments, actuality loses its validity for him; he is free and above it. (CI, 270) The text of The Waste Land which emerges from Brooks's interpretation of the poem is a paradigm both of the ironic method and of the ironic consciousness. His text of The Waste Land frees the ironist—the poet, the critic, and the readers of both the poem and its interpretation—from time by recreating, restoring, and discovering the complex unity of experience. I am not implying here that the structure of The Waste Land "is" or "is n o t " "ironic." Since no text has meaning apart from the interpretations of it, no statement can be made about what a poem "is," but only about what certain interpretations let it " m e a n . " Brooks's interpretation allows (or perhaps, coerces) the text to "mean" irony and complexity: The basic method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity. The poem works in terms of surface parallelisms which in reality make ironical contrasts and in terms of surface contrasts which in reality constitute parallelisms. . . . The two aspects taken together give the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is retained. The complexity of the experience is not violated by the apparent forcing upon it of a predetermined scheme. (MP, 167) The apparent chaos of reality is realistically maintained by the ambiguous surface of the poem; but explication reveals the ex[103]

Cleanth Brooks quisite ordering of detail behind this surface chaos. T h e revelation of the poem's structure gives "the effect" of the construction of a new whole by resolving apparently discordant elements in a poem, but it does not give a truly new order because the contradictions which it resolves are only apparent antitheses. Brooks's precise wording becomes important at this point. H e goes on to describe the method of The Waste Land in this way: " T h e statement oí surface similarities . . . are ironically revealed to be dissimilarities, and the association of apparent dissimilarities . . . culminates in later realization that the dissimilarities are only superficial—that the chains of likenesses are in reality fundamental" (MP, 172; m y italics). By negating the positivistic-naturalistic actuality of the world, irony clears the way for poetry to reveal the fundamental, the ground, the original analogies constituting reality; it allows the poet " t o reconcile the irrelevant or apparently warring elements of experience" (MP, 33; m y italics). If the poet, then, must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary. . . . He is rather giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern. (Urn, 213-214; my italics) Despite his constant insistence that his critical theory is not influenced by any ideology or nonliterary consideration (see, for example, Urn, 253ff), there lies behind what R.S. Crane calls Brooks's "critical m o n i s m " 1 3 a Gnostic faith in a lost but recoverable world ordered not by logic but by analogy. The structure of Brooks's criticism rests upon a foundation which may be best described as a "spiritual m o n i s m " reinforced by an almost visionary belief in the existence of an Ideal Absolute order in a separated world or Spirit. The ironic poet "re-discovers" and "represents" this order and returns man to these lost "origins," [104]

Cleanth Brooks where he may be refreshed by the creative source of unity and wholeness. The poet lifts the veil of chaos and suspends the deadening restrictions of the actual. He returns us to the source of the "tradition," where, before the Fall into scientific time, which progresses, defines, and determines, all men participated in the medieval world picture of correspondences and the beneficent stillness which it bestows. By virtue of a presumed macrocosm-microcosm relation between Word and World, irony creates poetic simulacra of a lost, Unfällen reality which is Absolute. Yet Brooks, as ironist, experiences the limitations of his aesthetic creed. The kind of freedom and order which he desires cannot be "actualized" in the world; only in the Word can he "re-create" and "re-discover" the nonactual completion and stillness which he desires. In fact, the ironic poem functions magically to "represent" the unified perception of the order. Its "intention" recreates the dream of the Idea; and its "structure" requires that this Image be grasped only by the Unfällen apprehension which intuits unities—that is, perceives time instantaneously and spatially—and thereby annihilates, by the necessities of its internal organization, which is a simulacrum of the newly refound order, all simplifying, fallen, temporal modes of perception. Thus, although irony returns a completely ordered, although nonrational world to the present, it also necessitates that History itself be abandoned for a closed, complete, Ideal Image. As Kierkegaard points out in The Concept of Irony, irony is a valuable way to negate the inadequate; it is negatively useful when its rebellion against a given actuality is justified historically. Negatively, of course, Brooks's position is useful and justifiable. The positivists had seemingly appropriated historical reality and Time itself and made them tools for their own imperialistic, coercive, dehumanizing ends. As a result, irony infinitely negates time and history. However, the poetic image of the Ideal put forward as the Word, the autotelic ironic poem, is offered as an alternative not only to positivistic actuality but to |105]

Cleanth Brooks all historical and temporal actuality as well. In fact, it becomes a conscious modern strategy to detemporalize Time by turning it into space through the agency of irony and the ironic poem. Like Brooks, other modern ironists consciously try to create infinitely " c o m p l e x , " totalizing Images with which to replace history. These are often, but not always, modelled on the mythic paradigm of the cyclic theory of eternal return. Allen Tate, for example, announces that he wants to replace naturalistic, utilitarian history with what Brooks calls "concrete history," in which, Tate says, " 'images are only to be contemplated, and perhaps the act of contemplation after long exercise initiates a habit of restraint, and the setting up of absolute standards which are less formulas for action than an interior discipline of the mind.' " 1 4 T h e "natural view" of history is displaced by irony's desire to create Images of history. T h e abstract, spatialized counters of the extensive manifold become Absolute and inviolable, like Brooks's ironic poem. If the extensive manifold of the positivists spatializes in the Bergsonian sense, that is, dissects and externalizes the living and continuous durée, then Tate, Brooks, and the other ironists spatialize history in Joseph Frank's sense of the term. They replace temporal events with Images whose interior relations are solely predicated upon a non temporal, spontaneous recognition of the ironic interrelationship of parts. Echoing Pound, Frank points out that "an image is defined not as a pictorial reproduction but as unification of disparate ideas and emotions into a complex presented spatially in an instant of t i m e . " 1 5 This "imagizing" of time has its roots in the ironist's desire to be negatively free of the limitations of historical circumstance and continuity. In order not only to feel free of temporal continuity but to destroy linear time itself, the ironist consciously joins forces with m y t h to "actualize" his atemporal Absolute. As Kierkegaard explains, the ironist, feeling free by virtue of negation, mistakenly loses his individual ego and believes he shares in the eternal ego which is timeless: therefore, as Kierkegaard points out, the ironist must not admit his own past: [106]

Cleanth Brooks Insofar as irony should be so conventional as to accept a past, this past must be of such a nature that irony can retain its freedom over it. . . . It was therefore the mythical aspect of history . . . which especially found grace in its eyes. Authentic history, on the other hand, wherein the true individual has his positive freedom, because in this he has his premises, must be dispensed with. (CI, 294) As I have argued earlier, there is neither beginning nor logical and causal progression in an ironic poem. Each and every part is coequally a beginning. When irony is applied to history in this way, we have myth. The ironist recognizes no beginning in history and no causal series which restricts him. There is always the possibility of return since time is either analogic, as in Tate, cyclic, as in the primitive concept of eternal return, 1 6 or both, as in Yeats's A Vision. In any case, the ironist treats history as an ironic poem, often by reducing it to myth. Brooks's interpretation of A Vision is the "center" of Modern Poetry and the Tradition because it is a paradigm of the N e w Critical conjunction of "irony" and " m y t h . " Brooks's "text" of Yeats attempts to totalize complexity and to externalize it as Absolute in an Image based upon the theory of the eternal return, that is, upon Yeats's theory of the phases of the moon and of the Great Year. As Brooks notes, Yeats begins with a hostility to all-pervasive science which is both abstract and nonevaluative. What Yeats wants, according to Brooks, is an account of experience which would go beyond the limitations of any abstract system: "a philosophy which was at once 'logical and boundless.' " U n like science, it will not exclude any element of an infinitely complex experience; yet, it will be "logical" in order to prevent the multiplicity of life in Time from disintegrating completely. However, the spatial and visual metaphors of Brooks's discourse impose the ideal of "boundary" upon the ideal of "logical" and thereby translate Yeats's desire into the ironic vision. Irony becomes the necessary price for the unified sensibility: The system is . . .an instrument for, as well as symbol of, the poet's re-integration of his personality. . . . The system, to [107]

Cleanth Brooks put it concisely, allows Yeats to see the world as a great drama, predictable in its larger aspects . . . but in a pattern which allows for the complexity of experience. (MP, 175-76, 200; my italics)

In Brooks's "text" of A Vision, "logic" becomes "pattern" and " d r a m a . " Time and experience are formed into a harmonious, unchanging artwork whose organization is cyclic, like the temporal orientations of primitive cultures, and is analogical, like Tate's view of concrete history. As Mircea Eliade shows, 1 7 prehistorical civilizations transform both linear time and random change into patterns of repeating cycles. In order to escape from both senseless flux and the historical limitations of his own temporal situation, primitive man constructs aesthetically and ontologically comforting mythodramatic patterns. By means of these mythic projections, he can predict all meaningful events, that is, those which regularly occur. This constant structure of return lets primitive man feel psychologically and ontologically free of the past; it is always possible for him to begin again. In this light, then, the primitive and cyclic show themselves to be special cases of the ironic urge to contain all possibilities while standing outside any temporal actuality. In a similar way, Allen Tate's view of history as a group of Images reduces time to spatial patterns. He changes linear history and random flux into aesthetic structures modelled, as we have seen above, on plastic art forms. Concrete history unifies temporal events so that they may be "fixed" or "arrested" for contemplation. 1 8 Tate transfers the stasis of plastic art to history, and Brooks extends this transfer to literature. In his interpretation of A Vision, Brooks "a-temporizes" history by binding it within a pattern of recurring Images for contemplation. Even though history becomes a "drama," in Brooks's interpretation of Yeats's system, it remains atemporal since drama is defined essentially by the ironic interrelationships of its patterns of Images and metaphors; drama is taken over into the realm of permanence and plastic form. 1 9 This seems to be part of [108]

Cleanth Brooks what Brooks sees in Yeats's c o m m e n t on Dante and Villon: " 'They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the intellect has wrought the w h o l e of life to d r a m a , to crisis, that we may live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity* " {MP, 201; my italics). Brooks's " t e x t , " "Yeats: T h e Poet as M y t h - M a k e r , " reduces history to a series of cycles structured by analogy and repetition; m y t h itself becomes an a r t w o r k , an Image contemplated as Absolute; as Kierkegaard w o u l d put it, it is time alienated f r o m itself and externalized. T h e spatial view of history is a necessary result of irony's substitution of the image of history for time. In Brooks's case, the mythic view of history and the structure of poetry exists in a macrocosm-microcosm relation: " T h e essential structure of a poem resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses" (Urn, 203). 2 0 Both the p o e m and the m y t h of history are " b o u n d e d " and self-referential and thereby create something fixed and removed f r o m change. T h e y actualize the Absolute in the spatial f o r m of the Image, the W o r d , as it were. Joseph Frank's discussion of spatial f o r m in m o d e r n literature, although begun f r o m different premises, reaches the same conclusion: Time is no longer felt as an objective causal progression with clearly marked-out differences between periods; nor has it become a continuum in which distinction between past and present are wiped out. And here we have a striking parallel with the plastic arts. Just as the dimension of depth has vanished from the sphere of visual creation, so the dimension of historical depth has vanished from the content of the major works of modern literature. Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that while it may accentuate surface differences eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition. (WG, 59) In Anatomy of Criticism, N o r t h r o p Frye argues that every ironic m o d e sooner or later returns to m y t h as a w a y of perception. Just as in Brooks's reading of Yeats, this is generally accompanied by a return to cyclical theories of history and to the [109]

Cleanth Brooks oracular style of "The Second C o m i n g . " In the twentieth century, Frye notes, "The return of irony to myth . . . is contemporary with, and parallel to, abstraction, expressionism, cubism, and similar efforts in painting to emphasize the self-contained pictorial structure." 2 1 This mythic structure, in other words, is one mechanism available to the ironist for developing a nonreferential, harmonized, "bounded" image. Frye's conjunction of irony, myth, and space parallels Brooks's interpretation of Yeats, in which much the same triad releases the ironist from the burdens of the past and present. By annihilating actuality, by explicitly recognizing the freedom from time inherent in cyclic returns, and by totalizing history in a plastic image of circles which in its infinite potential for "complexity" "actualizes" in the Word what is impossible in the World, this central essay establishes the Ironic and N e w Critical primacy of Word over World and Eternity over Time. One of the metaphysical implications of the culmination of irony in spatial form is the perpetuation of dualism: mind vs. body, subject vs. object, Word vs. World, poetry vs. reader, all of which Brooks sets out to overcome in his attack on the dissociated sensibility. In "The Heresy of Paraphrase" (Urn, 192ff), Brooks develops a theory of context which makes a poem "inviolable." As a result of his determination not to allow science to compromise poetry, he insists that form and content are one, or, in other words, that there is not or should not be a separable content in a poem. N o poem is paraphrasable; each poem is, in fact, its own language. The "meanings" of words are so altered by context, by the ironic interrelationships in which each word exists with every other in the poem, that no word in a poem is translatable into "discourse." When Ivor Winters paraphrases "the night wore" as "the night passed," Brooks upbraids him: "But the word wore does not mean literally that 'the night passed,' it means literally that 'the night wore'—whatever wore may mean" (Urn, 201). Brooks is justified in criticizing the careless explicator, but his theory forces even an apologist such as Murray Krieger to claim that this theory of poetic context results [110]

Cleanth Brooks in poetry so inviolable that it cannot be responded to in any manner except silent admiration. 2 2 Silence is, of course, the goal of irony, but as Kierkegaard indicates, such silence returns to " 'haunt and jest' " the ironist (CI, 275). The nonreferential structure of the poem denies the "translation" into ordinary language, commonly understood, of the ironic context. The unique language of each poem isolates work from work and work f r o m man, who thinks, apprehends, and communicates through a system of signs whose signification is normally at least partially understood by a group. By abrogating this community of language, Brooks denies most people, with the exception of the elite, access to poetry. By making it so special, so different, so "other-worldly," the ironist alienates those whom he announces he intends to save from the dehumanized actuality and, consequently, he achieves a diversity directly contrary to the unity he so desperately seeks. Ever wary of the "affective fallacy," Brooks does not try to define the aesthetic response to the ironic poem. Such "interests" would move him beyond the "text," that is, the words on the page, into a larger "context" which, by its contact with the reader, would violate the "disinterest" of aesthetic distance. Eliseo Vivas, however, describes the effect of the ironic poem upon its reader as "an experience of rapt attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of the object's immanent meanings and values in their fiali presentational immediacy." 2 3 This "aesthetic response" turns the reader away from the World and toward the Word. In the ironic poem, as Brooks describes it, language is autotelic and self-purposive. As a result, in the aesthetic apprehension of such an object, the observer remains "caught," rapt in attention, as he contemplates the order within the image which irony recreates. He follows the pattern of the interrelations of the poem and does not leave them for the duration of the experience. Thus, when the object of contemplation pretends to incorporate and order history, as in Brooks's interpretation of Yeats's A Vision, the observer need never suspend his contemplation to return to the World. The complex pattern that is "history," al[111]

Cleanth Brooks though it should be grasped intuitively, in the moment, requires all of Time for its complete explication, just as history requires all of time to unfold itself. This is, of course, the ultimate goal of the ironic position. When man abandons actuality to contemplate the Absolute realized as an artifact, irony's victory is complete. Actuality is denied in favor of a synthetic and synchronic image. Paradoxically, however, irony, which for Brooks should overcome the dualism of thought and feeling, form and content, not only further separates man from poem, as we have seen, but it also furthers the isolation of each individual in his own windowless monad. During the aesthetic act, the subject is turned away from "actual" history, from others, and from those "natural" aspects of his own Being in time. The haunting and jesting stillness of irony brings Brooks to the position directly antithetical to that he professes to desire. While there can be little disagreement that the ironic strategy of Brooks and many of the other New Critics is to a large extent responsible for saving the study of poetry, and even fiction, from the destructive impulses of the academic and journalistic classifiers who learn their methodology from modern technology, it must finally be recognized that this same strategy has itself had profoundly destructive effects, that, in fact, it has failed in two most important areas: it has not overcome dualism and united the sensibility and it has caused a loss of human significance, of content, in the study of literature. It is time to expand the account of the failure of Modernism's ironic strategy and to suggest an alternative view of irony, and thus of literature, which might better succeed. Seren Kierkegaard's study The Concept of Irony offers another attitude toward irony which is remarkably similar to one of the defining impulses of Postmodernism. It is, of course, impossible to do more than outline Kierkegaard's study here and to suggest its immediate relevance for Brooks's failure. I only hope to show that Kierkegaard points to a strategy potentially more capable of dealing with the modern problems of art and life than Brooks's theory of contextual irony. [112]

Cleanth Brooks The failure of Brooks's theory of pervasive irony can be attributed to the necessary loss of Time and, consequently, of the World, which it entails. As William V. Spanos argues in " M o d ern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique," we have begun to see "that behind the strategy of the N e w Criticism lies the impulse to disengage literature from the defiling contingencies of life in historical time." 2 4 Kierkegaard's analysis of irony makes it quite clear that the movement away from time which Spanos finds in the N e w Criticism and which he explains by the N e w Critics' inability to stand in the face of dread and the existential nothingness which it reveals, has its formal impulse in the urge to "ironize," to become negatively free of all restrictions, to stand or hover above actuality in order to attain to the infinite perception and knowledge of the gods. The separation of time and eternity upon which the ironic impulse is based is dualistic and dissociates the human sensibility. That is, it divides the temporal Being-in-the-World which Heidegger defines as the ground of Dasein from the spiritual aspirations of man to the Eternal and his intuitions of something beyond the material. Following Hegel, Kierkegaard defines "pervasive" or "unmastered" irony as "infinite absolute negativity": It is negativity because it only negates; it is infinite because it negates not this or that phenomenon; it is absolute because it negates by virtue of a higher which it is not. Irony establishes nothing, for that which is to be established lies behind it. It is divine madness which rages like Tamburlaine and leaves not one stone sitting upon another in its wake. (CI, 278) The destruction of the actual world is "divine" not only because it is madly inspired like Plato's poet but also because it is accomplished from the vantage point of a being who, hovering, becomes a bird or an angel who sees and is satisfied to see "what is passed, or passing, or to come." From this transcendent perspective, the ironist sees history as an image, an artifact which removes the pain of time and the frustration of actuality. The [113]

Cleanth Brooks ironist loses his substantiality, his continuity with the material world in the practice of his "art." For Kierkegaard, Socrates is the archironist, and he approvingly paraphrases, from The Clouds, Aristophanes' satiric description of Socrates' ironic position vis-à-vis Time and the World: He [Aristophanes] has therefore assigned Socrates a place in the Thoughtery in a suspended basket. . . . But whether he hangs from the rafters in a basket or stares omphalopsychically into himself, and in this way frees himself to some extent from earthly gravitation, he still hovers in either case. It is this hovering which is so extremely descriptive: it is the attempted ascension into heaven which fulfills itself in rising to a glimpse of the entire realm of the ideal, when this staring into oneself causes the self to expand to the universal self, pure thought with its content. (CI, 180) The movement out of time which the ironist makes by hovering removes all substance, all content, from his existence and makes him disinterested. By destroying all actuality f r o m the infinite and timeless perspective of irony he kicks himself free of the earth: "The actuality which shall give him content is not, hence he is free from the restraint in which the given actuality binds him, yet negatively free and as such hovering, because there is nothing which binds him" (CI, 279). This "hovering" is the key to "destroying" Allen Tate, who, as Paul de Man would say, is blind at the moment of his greatest insight. 25 Tate's interpretation of the Angelists—Poe, Mallarmé, and Valéry, among others—condemns them for dismissing material forms "for the illusory pursuit of essence." 26 However, his commitment to irony does not allow him to see that Angelism, like cyclic history, is only a special case of the ironic vision; it is an example of the ironist's movement not only out of time but into a world of form without content, and ultimately, into "pure poetry" (see CI, 321). Since irony springs " f r o m the metaphysical problem concerning the relation of the Idea to actuality" and because "metaphysical actuality is beyond time . . . it is impossible for the actuality [114]

Cleanth Brooks desired by irony to be given in time" (CI, 295). Irony, therefore, like Angelism, maintains a dualism of existence and essence, and it insists upon the priority of an ordered but empty realm which is beyond this world, behind irony, and which exists as an image held in the eye of the ironist. As a result of this priority, even Solger, whom Kierkegaard guardedly approves as a theoretician and practitioner of irony, "is unable to grant the finite any validity, unable to render the infinite concrete" (CI, 327). While he may, like Brooks, transcend the limits of his actuality, he does so only by dividing man and denying his temporal and earth-bound interests. Spanos' "Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of T i m e " thoroughly establishes the motive for the N e w Criticism's withdrawl from existence in time as the pain resulting from the opposition between the unstructured messiness of Being-in-the-World and the hard, neat outline of plastic form which these critics impose upon verbal art. In so doing, Spanos, like Kermode, Hough, and many others, has established the primary importance of the Image to both modern literature and to the N e w Critics. 27 It is the most crucial element of their attempt to spatialize time. We have seen how Brooks's theory of contextual poetry results in the creation of closed poems which are gemlike artifacts to be apprehended instantaneously along the model of the perception of plastic art. We have also seen how this reductive transformation of a poem—a verbal event, a process—to a static image by means of explication and context is intimately related to Brooks's insistence upon irony as the structural device of poetry which allows even the totalization of history in a mythic image. Kierkegaard, however, goes further than any of these modern critics to demonstrate that the projection of images to stop time and to overcome the limitations of a historical period is only another special instance of the ironic vision. From the perspective of the hovering ironist, each and every historical actuality is incomplete and partial; it is not complex or "complete" enough. Each and every actuality is only part of time; the uncertainty and [115]

Cleanth Brooks instability of actuality results f r o m its incompleteness, f r o m its change, its constant m o v e m e n t f r o m one partial state to another. This unsettling observation causes the ironist pain. Existentially, the vision of change reveals death, dread, and nothingness; metaphysically, and perhaps theologically, it demonstrates the supposed inadequacy of the real world to the vision of spirituality and infinity the ironist intuits. Most importantly, "incompleteness" denies the metaphysical freedom of choice among an infinitude of possibilities which all history and a universe of potentialities might offer an imaginative mind. As a result, the ironist hovers and imagizes in order to see all possibilities of time at a glance as empty forms "essentialized" in a mental world, in a mind expanded infinitely to contain all potentialities. A series of questions presents itself at this point: Why is the ironist willing to abandon time, history, and the world for essences and emptiness? Beyond relief f r o m the dread and pain of change, and the threat of death, does the ironist gain anything in his hovering? Are the rewards of the image and of totalization viable ones not only for literary criticism but for literature and life itself? These questions can be answered tentatively by saying that the ironist achieves a vision of formal possibilities, empty of content, f o r m e d in an image, apprehended simultaneously, culminating in the infinite repose and stillness which only such intuitive contemplation allows. In other words, the reward of unmastered irony is Godhead. It is a continuation of the basic tradition of anthropomorphizing the earth, and its possibility is greatly facilitated by Nietzsche's announcement that God is dead. It is an act of complete and total freedom which allows the ironist as artist to impose order upon all possibility or any small world which he chooses to create by drawing on his vision of potentiality. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, driven by the uncertainty and instability of his personal life— which reveals to him his o w n ontological precariousness in the world—proclaims to the rather lascivious Lynch that the modern [116]

Cleanth Brooks artist must, like the deistic god, become disinterested in his creation and, while off paring his fingernails, view it from afar. Stephen's proclamation, along with Hulme's speculations on the cold, hard, dry, static nature of modern art, has had a decisive impact upon N e w Critical theory and practice. Kierkegaard's interpretation of irony opens up this relationship 'n a new way and lets the ironic vision which lies hidden behind Stephen's thomistic language emerge as the center upon which the structure of his aesthetic discourse is built. There is no need to detail here h o w Stephen's triad of dantas, integritas, and quidditas can result in a reified and autoletic object which suspends any conflict between the ironist's desire for the perfection of aesthetic form and a world in which Lynch can scribble obscenities on the bottom of the Venus Praxiteles.28 It is enough to point out that the neo-Kantian disinterest of both Stephen and the New Critics is only another of the particular strategies of the ironic vision. In fact, it should be clear that Stephen's "aesthetic" is both a metaphysical and an ontological statement, which, like all such statements, must, as Kierkegaard points out in Repetition, emerge from and therefore founder on the "interest" of the thinker. 29 I emphasized Brooks's treatment of Yeats in order to suggest that the text of this interpretation is a paradigm of just this aspiration to Godhead. It is the clearest example in modern criticism of the ironist's desire to become other than human. The freedom from time and pain, from history and determinism, which Brooks gains, provides the ironist, as Kierkegaard says, "a certain enthusiasm, for he becomes intoxicated as it were by the infinity of possibles; and should he require consolation for all that has passed away, then let him take refuge in the enormous reserves of the possible" (CI, 279). But this is not a purely negative function designed merely to escape from the discomfort of a dread-ful situation. The positive value of the ironist's position is die ability to create freely, totally, and instantly upon will—to impose an order which mirrors that of his own mind or imagination without suffering the rebuff [117]

Cleanth Brooks of actuality, which might, in its own Being, resist his coercive efforts. In a way which parallels Kierkegaard's insistence that authentic freedom is possible only within actuality, Wallace Stevens explains that the very existence of poetry requires the opposition of what he calls "imagination" and "reality": "It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential." 3 0 The ironist, unwilling to endure the restrictions necessarily resulting f r o m this interaction, destroys the World to unencumber his imagination. The ironist has at least two particular strategies open to him in this enterprise. H e can contemplate the totality of the possible if he chooses or he can arrange from these possibilities any pattern which he finds congenial. O f course, all the patterns which he creates will be timeless and perfect forms, abstract transformations, and not moments in history. He is not open to or dependent upon the world for knowledge; rather, he creates his "worlds" instantly and holds them forever in new patterns which never exhaust or change the pattern, the Image of history—in other words, which never have historical or human significance. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger, in dialogue with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, not only establishes that the ground of human being and human perception is time, but that it is to be differentiated from the infinite perception and knowledge of the Godhead, which is creative and instantaneous. 3 1 Since ontologically man is defined by temporality, he is finite and, in the ironist's sense, "incomplete." Dasein is dependent upon the outside world for knowledge and creativity. The ironist sees this condition as a limitation, while Heidegger sees in it the possibility of openness, of receptive waiting, of a chance for a more authentic rediscovery of Being: To begin with, we can say negatively that finite knowledge is noncreative intuition. What is presented immediately and in its particularity must be already on hand. Finite intuition looks to the intuitable as something on which it is dependent and which exists in its own right. That which is intuited proceeds (herlei[118]

Cleanth Brooks ten) from such an essent and for that reason is also termed intuitos denvatus, "derivative." Finite intuition of the object is not able by itself to give itself an object. It must let this object be given. But not every intuition as such is receptive—only the finite is so. Hence the finitude of intuition lies in its receptivity. (KPM, 30-31) N o t only does this early statement of Heidegger help define his later notion of Gelassenheit, but it points out that the ironist must necessarily leave the World, the basis of man's finitude—and as Heidegger would have it, the ground of man's Being—because he cannot be receptive or open to "essents," to things, to objects. The ironist must retreat into an empty but perfect stillness which cannot possibly overcome the dualism inherited f r o m the Cartesian tradition or create or explicate a literature which is meaningful in a world of content, of historical incompleteness, crisis, messiness, and finitude. Irony does not "care" (Sorge) for the immediate, but for what-is-not, for what is absent and nonexistent. Despite its "victory" over determinism, irony allows Dasein no context in which to exercise his freedom concretely. It removes him from the arena of action and choice, takes him to the only " w o r l d " still available to the ironist, and thus reduces Dasein's freedom to an abstraction or empty form. In order to be authentically free, as Kierkegaard puts it, man must feel himself "assimilated into a larger context" (CI, 296). Irony feels so "free" that it dispenses with "Authentic history . . . wherein the true individual has his positive freedom" (CI, 294). Modern literature does not, of course, in its highest m o ments, conform to the model which I have been drawing from Brooks's poetics. Modernism is not by any means so unqualifiedly unearthly and dehumanized as the coercive N e w Critical reading of it might suggest. The middle poetry of Yeats, for example, while dealing with the ironic strategy, never accepts it as a fully satisfactory stance or solution. The seemingly closed and ironic form of "Sailing to Byzantium," for example, is a major instance of Yeats's treatment of irony and spatialization, but it is by no means a solution with which the Yeats of The Tower can [119]

Cleanth Brooks rest. Significantly, "Sailing to Byzantium" is followed immediately by the title poem of the volume, which arrives at almost a diametrically opposite "conclusion." For Yeats, these opposites are not held in tension in imagistic form as alternatives among which he cannot or will not choose. They are not possibilities at which he glances aesthetically or which he holds in suspension out of time and action, resolved in images which give Yeats and his readers a temporary victory over time. They are humanly weighed alternatives, dealt with at different moments by the persona of the volume in his own dramatic, that is, human, time; in other words, they are a discrete and discontinuous series of stances toward the world, each of which is carefully articulated by the proper and appropriate voice. Both the "rhetoric" and the "dramatics" of Yeats's major poetry contradicts any interpretation of him as an ironist in the Brooksian sense. In "Sailing to Byzantium," the "conclusion's" repetition of the opening stanza's tripartite rhetoric returns the reader from the timeless Byzantium and golden birds "such as Grecian goldsmiths make," to the sensual world of "Fish, flesh, and fowl." (I will come back to the problem of circular form a bit further on.) The poem does not "end" in an image apotheosizing the birds's instantaneous vision of history, but on the temporal metaphor of change: "Of what is passed, or passing, or to come." 3 2 Rhetorically, the poem does not come to rest in a timeless vision. Too many of Yeats's critics ignore the fact that his poems are "dramas." 3 3 "Sailing to Byzantium" presents the actions and emotions of a pathetic old man who is facing death—the undeniable evidence of his finitude and ontological insecurity. The poem proceeds from this fundamental situation. The old man leaves "that country" not only to gain permanence and immortality but "to sing," that is, to create poems independently of his life in time by achieving an instantaneous vision of the infinite possibilities of history through his own transformation into artifact. A point which other critics have made before must be made [120]

Cleanth Brooks again. Yeats is not his persona. The complex theory of the mask, which Ellman, among others, has developed at length, 3 4 prevents such simple identification. Yeats does not ask that his "heart" be "consumed away"; rather, he dramatizes a futile attempt to project the self beyond time. The attempt is futile because ultimately, as Sturge M o o r e first pointed out, the persona does take his form from a natural thing and because, even as a "golden bird," he can sing of only what he tried to flee, time itself. Another point which perhaps has not been made enough is that the theory of the mask is not Yeats's version of the disinterested artist. Again, the complex psychology of the mask does not allow for the complete separation of poet and persona, for the neo-Kantian distance between artist and artifact. Throughout his work, especially in the Autobiography,35 Yeats is thoroughly conscious of the close interdependence of reality and imagination, of his "true self" and his various masks. The tension between these elements is necessary to Yeats's creativity and reminds us of Stevens' insistence upon the essential interrelationship of world and mind in art—an interdependence the ironist abhors. The closed or circular form of "Sailing to Byzantium" has been suggested as evidence that Yeats, as an ironist, tries to create a nonreferential, autotelic poem which is a hard, dry, image. 3 6 As I have pointed out, such theories require that the poem be seen as a static pattern of radically detemporalized verbal tensions which can absorb its reader in the peaceful intricacies of artifice. I believe, however, that the circular form of this p o e m works in a different way, which, unfortunately, I can only hint at here. 3 7 The temporal process of reading this poem appears closed by the "conclusion's" triadic rhetoric, which interlocks with the structure of stanza one. For the process of reading to be reduced to the instantaneous vision of the poem as image, there must be a harmonious balance of tensions at the point of this intersection. T h e poem, then, could work reflexively and the " c o m p l e x " meaning of the "beginning" could be "seen" in light of our o w n awareness of its " e n d . " [121]

Cleanth Brooks In "Sailing to Byzantium," however, the "return" to the opening creates an ideational discordance which the rhetorical similarity cannot contain and cannot harmonize. The beginning is not "fulfilled" and "seen" in its complex relationship to the end; following the return to the opening, its meaning is radically changed by the reader's new interpretation, which comes from having learned in the process of reading the poem that the initial "dualism" of "that country" and Byzantium—as well as the numerous other binary ironic tensions in the poem—is only a strategic fiction which the persona adopts as a stance in the face of time and finitude. The persona has throughout the poem been "caught" in that temporal world which prompts the desired fiction of "Byzantium." The dualistic strategy around which the structure of the poem is built is itself a specific pose of the ironic consciousness. When this stance is "reduced" or "deconstructed," the metaphysical "interest" of the persona appears as the motive for his comforting projection of a lost, but recoverable, artificial paradise. In other words, what on first reading appears to be a movement out of the world and time into art and eternity, is shown by the circular form of the poem to be only an impossible myth, a fiction generated by a being in time w h o seeks the comfort of an Ideal dream and who hopes to find the Absolute freedom of infinite perception in an image of history. These "changes" in the repeated readings of the poem's beginning result from the time expended and the awareness gained in the process of reading the poem. They are made possible by a kind of irony unlike Brooks's, but similar to Kierkegaard's notion of "mastered irony" and very much like the " f o r m " of his Fear and Trembling, which I will discuss later. Perhaps most importantly, unlike the kind of response which, as I have indicated, Vivas attributes to a "viewing" of an ironic text, the reader of this poem is not allowed to rest in the supernatural or supratemporal position, gratified by an instantaneous vision of history. A careful reader has his normal "ironic" expectations—centered in this poem on the dualistic oppositions—frustrated and finds it impossible to rest in a simple har[122]

Cleanth Brooks mony of unresolved tensions. He cannot become disinterested like Yeats's golden bird because he is now aware that to do so is in fact to choose, on the basis of a metaphysical "interest," a stance toward the world which, although it tries to leave the world, is conditioned by human finitude and by death itself. He learns that, like the golden bird he must sing of time despite himself. It is not enough, however, merely to suggest how certain modern masterpieces are successful in escaping the deadly effects of the urge to ironize and become Godhead. It is much more important to see that certain works exist in the ironic matrix, are in fact apparently as pervasively ironic as Brooks could wish, and yet, because they do not emerge from any metaphysical "interest" in overcoming the world, they are not finally committed to the ironic vision. Kierkegaard, as is the case in almost all areas where irony is concerned, is also helpful here. He provides a language to describe the movement out of irony which some modern pieces make and suggests a solution to the problems which originally give rise to Brooks's need for unmastered irony. It is important, however, to note that the existential implications of this movement away from unmastered irony, which has its roots in Kierkegaard's own pseudonymous works and certain works by late modern authors like Yeats, are the pervasive themes of most literature which has come to be thought of as postmodern. Although contemporary writers continue to oppose their texts to the dehumanizing, positivistic, technological society we live in, they do not, like the ironist, do so to reject history and time itself. This new openness to a nonscientific, nonlinear time, which can be found, for example, in Ionesco's plays and Beckett's fiction, is central to an understanding of how postmodern writers are reacting against not only their society but also the ironic interpretation of the modern world perpetrated for the most part by the New Critics. Sartre, of course, is a major spokesman for the movements against both scientism and disinterested art. His critical method is the obverse of the New Critics'. He begins his criticism not from a distanced look at a [123]

Cleanth Brooks disinterested object, but by first establishing the metaphysical interest of a particular author. Writing of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Sartre claims, "A fictional technique always relates back to the novelist's metaphysics. The critic's task is to define the latter before evaluating the former." If we proceed in the same way to evaluate Kierkegaard, we will find that, as Sartre says of Faulkner, Kierkegaard's metaphysics is a "metaphysics of time." 3 8 This is, of course, a crucial fact and poses an interesting question: If Kierkegaard, like Yeats, is an acknowledged ironist, how can this be reconciled with his temporal metaphysics, that is, with his engaged human interest in art, time, and history? We can find a beginning to the answer to this paradox in the final section of The Concept of Irony, in which Kierkegaard provides an outline for a theory of irony which, in fact, emerges out of his temporal interest: When irony has first been mastered it undertakes a movement direcdy opposed to that wherein it proclaimed its life as unmastered. Irony now limits, renders finite, defines, and thereby yields truth, actuality, and content. . . . Irony as mastered moment exhibits itself in its truth precisely by the fact that it teaches us to actualize actuality, by the fact that it places due emphasis upon actuality. (CI, 338, 340) In mastered irony, the poet hovers not above the actual, but above his own creation. He transcends the work's visible irony, just as Yeats in "Sailing to Byzantium" goes beyond the ironic fiction of his persona and refuses to be wholly infatuated by the external projection of the persona's " m i n d . " Goethe is Kierkegaard's example of a poet who, by mastering irony, "succeeded in making his existence as a poet congrue with his actuality" (CI, 337). Kierkegaard's "authorship," of course, as Stephen Crites has shown, 3 9 is one of the fullest examples of this type of irony. The "open form" of his pseudonymous works reveals some of the implications for aesthetic form of a temporal metaphysics. The [124]

Cleanth Brooks congruence of art and life in the temporality of mastered irony is the ground for positive freedom for the self and true poetic creativity and the authentically poetic life: "the poet only lives poetically when oriented and thus assimilated into the age in which he lives, when he is positively free within the actuality to which he belongs" (CI, 338). N o matter whether or not this "positive" freedom takes the form of engaged ethical, political, artistic, or religious action, it is an existential movement and, as such, needs to deal with possibility not in the abstract but in the concrete. In mastered irony, "possibility is not so prudish as not to betake itself to actuality, but actuality is possibility" (CI, 338). This reversal of the ironist's position results in a movement into history: the content of life must become a true and meaningful moment in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul desires. Actuality in this way acquires its validity . . . as a history wherein consciousness successively outlives itself, though in such a way that happiness consists not in forgetting all this but becomes present in it. (CI, 341) The self "becomes" in this scheme as the mind evolves toward those levels where the commitment to the temporal and to what is immediately present becomes more and more radical. In fact, as the "stages" change, each succeeding one contains its predecessors so that nothing is lost, discarded, or dissociated, but merely appropriated and transcended. What is absent does not, as it does for Brooks and other modern ironists, lure the self away from what-is. For Kierkegaard, mastered irony can end dualism and overcome the divided sensibility because it is grounded on a view of man which locates value in temporality, in man's existence in and dealings with the world. T h e incarnational paradox, the mystery of Spirit and Eternity inhering in matter and time, suffuses Kierkegaard's "authorship." In Sickness Unto Death, for example, Anti-Climacus defines man as a synthesis, in fact, as a double synthesis: " M a n is a synthesis of the infinite and finite, of [125|

Cleanth Brooks the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity." 4 0 Despite the parody of Hegel in the passage f r o m which these lines are drawn, the fact of temporality as the medium in which man, the conjunction of time and the eternal, forms a self for himself is quite clear. Man's synthetic nature is both painful and the grounds for his potential salvation. Irony corrects those w h o plunge into the finite with no thought for the eternal, while mastered irony can correct those w h o suspend themselves above the earth by returning them to time. T h e paradox that life, the synthesis of time and the eternal, is found in the actual by virtue of the Incarnation is what Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript defines as the absurd: " T h e Absurd is—that the eternal truth has come into being in time, that God has come into b e i n g . " 4 1 Yet, even this fact depends upon the essential actuality of man: "the paradox . . . is essentially conditioned by the fact that a man is in existence, so that the explanation which takes away the paradox, fantastically transforms at the same time the exister into a fantastic something or another which belongs neither to time nor to eternity—but such a something or another is not a m a n " (CUP, 162). T h e location of man and truth in time leaves only what is present to be encountered as the " a b o d e " of the Absolute. I know that I run a risk of being misunderstood here when I insist upon paradox to differentiate between Kierkegaard and Brooks. Brooks, many will remind me, can no m o r e do without paradox than Kierkegaard himself. Yet, " T h e Language of Parad o x " provides ample material for precisely such differentiation. While for Kierkegaard the paradox is the incomprehensible absurdity of the Incarnation which insists upon the temporal locus of both man and the sacred, for Brooks " p a r a d o x " is always n o more than a linguistic trope used to contain signs or counters in a pattern or hierarchy of language and imagery. In fact, Brooks's understanding and use of "paradox" is only another strategy of the hovering and spatializing ironic mind. Its interest lies in containing the absurd and irrational in a nonlogical—indeed, an alogical—spatial form: [126]

Cleanth Brooks The poet must work by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly edge to edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions . . . . even the apparendy simple and straightforward poet is forced into paradoxes by the nature of his instrument. . . . The method is an extension of the normal language of poetry, not a perversion of it. (Urn, 9-10) Furthermore, paradox is not merely a tool in the service of an ironic project resolved upon reducing poetry to patterns of stresses and connotations; it also—and this is central to the difference between Brooks and Kierkegaard—emerges from a view of being which is, as I argued above, radically harmonized, ordered, and readily intelligible to the vision of the hovering ironist. One of the problems of Kierkegaard's authorship is that his pseudonyms usurp the aesthetic and literary and compel art and literature to function ironically, to create private worlds of "recollection" and "theater" as locations for their self-created Absolute. In Repetition, for example, Constantine Cons tan tius, in a meditation on masks, acting, and the theater, develops the simile of life as a "well-made" play or a farce consisting of a series of perfect moments. Constantine extends the aesthetic distance of these metaphors to his role in life as an observer and to his demands in his domestic life for unchanging order. 4 2 Similarly, in another example which could be multiplied throughout Kierkegaard's "authorship," Hilarius Bookbinder, the "editor" of Stages in Life's Way, presents " 'In Vino Veritas,' a recollection subsequently related by William A f h a m " which epitomizes the desires of Kierkegaard's personae to impose aesthetic form upon life or to withdraw into a world of art and memory. 4 3 Because Kierkegaard's "authors" impress literature in the service of irony, he must master the ironic movement (in a language currently more at-hand, he must destroy the ironic structure to reveal and evaluate the hidden "origins" of the ironic movement) in order to express his own anti-ironic, temporal vision of language and art in an appropriately temporal, verbal medium. [127]

Cleanth Brooks Fear and Trembling is representative of the fictional technique, and in its open-ended structure is itself a formal aesthetic equivalent for mastered irony and Kierkegaard's fundamental Incamational metaphysics. The visible irony of Johannes destroys both the "actual" world of the Copenhagen merchants and the "Ideal" world of the Hegelian synthesizers and systematizers. The latter try to proceed along the acquisitive route of the "extensive manifold"; as Kierkegaard says in Fear and Trembling, they try to go beyond faith and abstractly to absorb the spatialized wisdom of their fathers in order to rest secure in an unearned system which contains, explains, and predicts everything. 4 4 But Kierkegaard, although sympathizing with his pers o n a l destruction o f his dominant bourgeois actuality, turns an ironic glance back upon him and his artifact. Johannes creates ironic and aesthetic forms to try to define and enclose Abraham, particularly in the book's opening movement. Kierkegaard, however, confronts Johannes's creation with the temporal, indefinable, absurd act of faith and reveals the inability of ironic or "aesthetic" form to contain or "explain" a radically human and temporal, that is, changing, event. Technically, Kierkegaard lets Johannes strain the lyrical, dialectical, and ironic modes to the limit trying to enclose something essentially alien to the ironic and aesthetic, until these categories and the ironic strategy behind them burst from the strain. Paradoxically, the movement into time which Johannes cannot make himself (he cannot become a Knight of Faith; he remains a Knight of Infinite Resignation who has abandoned the world for heaven) is made by his work, which in its own "inadequacies" points beyond itself to time and the world as the proper medium for actualizing his topic. In its openness, its burst ironic forms, that is, in its temporality, Fear and Trembling is a formal alternative to Brooks's use of irony. Although I cannot perform here the full interpretation of Fear and Trembling which would be necessary to show that it is, in fact, a paradigm of mastered irony and of a temporal metaphysics, we can catch glimpses—in its open forms, in its "destructions"—of existential movements which cannot be worked [128]

Cleanth Brooks out in the closed form of an Image or artifact, movements such as that of Faith, whose only proper medium is human time. By examining the imagination in the light of the actual, i.e., in the light of the paradoxical synthesis of human being, Kierkegaard masters irony and hovers above the particular works which the ironic mind creates. Like Goethe, he properly evaluates each w o r k as an important moment in the existence of the poet's and reader's consciousness according to his model of stages. Each w o r k of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship deals with a h u m a n possibility from a particular point of view, but each work transcends that point of view by showing the weaknesses of the imaginative object or process it projects. Ultimately, each work "concludes" by opening out to a new possibility "higher" and m o r e involved in the actual than the perspective of the persona. 4 5 This pattern appears in works as diverse as EitherlOr, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Stages on Life's Way. In all of these works, higher temporal possibilities, often suggested by the persona himself, break the aesthetic form into fragments, prevent the contemplation of an image or "explanation"—disrupt the "perfect" world created by the artistgod—and demonstrate that the highest stage of consciousness is paradoxical; that is, they reveal the infinite in the finite and not in the image of the Absolute. Kierkegaard's works, therefore, are themselves part of the temporal process of raising levels of consciousness and returning readers to the paradox. The process of reading such works obviates the dangers of stillness and isolation described by Eliseo Vivas and cultivated by Brooks. In fact, criticism becomes more than the deadly process of explication, more than an attempt to drive time and the world out of life and literature. Language and form n o w "refer" and are allowed to be "affective." They make possible the discovery of value and spirit in the human unity of the here and now. While it is true that for Kierkegaard time is based on the Christian Incarnation, other artists have adopted his technique to refer man to a world not necessarily sanctified by God. Beckett, [129]

Cleanth Brooks Ionesco, Sartre, the late Yeats, and many postmodern poets employ Kierkegaard's technique of mastered irony to destroy the potentially sterilizing pervasive irony of Modernism by revealing in their own work the false and atemporal assumptions behind the modern "Tradition." They open literature to the implications of absurd time. 4 6 Their negation of irony by irony is a dialectical turn to the World and a réévaluation of World over Word. They are committed to the paradox that in and through the profane, what is sacred, creative, and valid is to be found in the here and now. Like Kierkegaard himself, they absurdly reveal the interpenetration of the spiritual and the profane. Ultimately, an understanding of Kierkegaard's notion of mastered irony is essential to comprehending much postmodern literature from Sartre and Thomas Pynchon to Wallace Stevens and W.C. Williams. 47 The openness of form and the repetition of reading based not on memory but on emergence explain h o w and why the literature of the absurd and poetry of immanence are not accepted by the N e w Critics or the French Structuralists. Kierkegaard prefaces Stages on Life's Way with a quotation from Lichtenberg: "Such works are mirrors: when a monkey peers into them, no apostle can be seen looking o u t . " 4 8 The great achievements and the great failures of much of Modernism are associated with its ironic stance. In its rebellion against abstraction and determinism, we applaud its tenacity. In its unwillingness and perhaps inability to appreciate the impossibility of withdrawing into the construction and contemplation of a static, complex unity, we see an ultimate urge to abandon life in this, our own historical period. Conrad shows us in both Jim and Axel Heyst that the desire to leave the world of action, moral choice, and time eventuates in death, and even Freudians see the urge for mystic contemplation as at least partially a death-wish. Unfortunately, the ironic Moderns' attacks on positivism were not completely successful; fortunately, perhaps, neither was their urge to stillness.

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Chapter Four

Leaves of Grass and the Center: Free Play or Transcendence

Whitman is quite rightly viewed by critics as having established the native American tradition of poetry. Contemporary poets, reacting against early Modernism's condemnation of Whitman, constantly return to his work as a source of definition for the American poem. Ezra Pound's belated acknowledgement of his indebtedness to Whitman in "A Pact" seems to have triggered the reconsideration by poets like Williams, Roethke, the Black Mountain School, and the "bard" of the fifties, Allen Ginsberg. Criticism did not catch up with the renovation of Whitman until the revisionist work of Roy Harvey Pearce, which insists upon the nature of Whitman's poetry as act or process and not as form or structure, not as achieved artifict. 1 Indeed, although there have been a variety of "Whitmans" defined by the critical biases of the misreader, the New Critical devaluation of Whitman for his loose, unstructured forms has dominated the Modern understanding of our poetic tradition. Cleanth Brooks, for example, would purge him from the canon of poetry because his form is not tight (MP, 71, 76). Some more sympathetic critics, like R.W.B. Lewis, have tried to "save" Whitman by arguing that his "aesthetic" is, in fact, the one which lies behind the New Criticism itself. In 1955, Lewis writes in The [131]

Walt Whitman American Adam that WTiitman "adapted [the Kantian aesthetic] to artistic creativity with a vigour and enthusiasm unknown before James Joyce and his associates in the twentieth century." 2 Pearce's "revisionary" reading of Whitman diverges from these typical Modern analyses by insisting that Leaves of Grass is a different kind of poetry than that written by the metaphysicals, symbolists, or N e w Critics themselves. Whitman's poetry is process and not product: "Like Pound after him, Whitman worked toward a new Paideuma: one entirely of process, of guiding, strengthening, energizing, and redefining the sensible self by putting it into direct contact with the world wherein it could be free, creative, and w h o l e . " 3 There is no need to debate the issue which Pearce defines. T h e standard interpretation of Whitman has now shifted to a position like Pearce's in the critical and poetic writing of W . C . Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stanley Burnshaw, John Vernon, and others. 4 These writers have deconstructed much of the mystification surrounding Whitman perpetrated by the N e w Critics and in the process of this deconstruction have opened up our definition of poetry itself. H o w ever, generally and for the most part, there is another myth surrounding Leaves of Grass which requires some destruction: the insistence upon Whitman as the American Adam, as the self alone, creating spontaneously, having sloughed off the skin of European systems in his driving attempts to be " n e w " and adequate to the American experience. 5 Generally, Whitman's urge to "make it new," as Pound says, has been taken naively, as a program of simply dismissing the past in his own poetry and prose. In fact, however, Whitman's attitude toward the past is more "constructive," by which I mean, of course, more "destructive," than the mere reduction of the past to, in Heidegger's term, "nullity." Yet, Whitman's attitude toward the past and his sympathies toward the tradition are ambiguous. His idea of "indirection" suggests his program should be more completely destructive than it is. Nonetheless, by deconstructing Whitman's prefaces and other prose works, a project of retrieving the past, tradition, and Europe emerges [132]

Walt Whitman from the primarily rhetorical insistence upon making it new. U l timately, of course, the retrieve of authentic problems and potentialities from the past vitalizes the " n e w " poetry and tradition he begins for America. My treatment of Whitman, then, has two parts, each of which is also subdivided into two arguments. In the first section, I will examine Whitman's prose to exhibit the destructive retrieve which programmatically motivates even the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass; but I will also show the extent to which Whitman's program remains mystified, partially in error, by accepting uncritically some of the language of the tradition he tries to avoid. The second section treats some of the poems to indicate how they are deconstractive yet, almost simultaneously, entrapped within a tradition marked precisely by the possibilities of transcendence and of centered discourse. Whitman can be said, particularly in his relationship to Emerson, which Harold Bloom sees as the defining aspect of the former's poems, to have initiated the American tradition of destroying the past, i.e., whatever has become a fixed part of the objectified tradition which obscures more than it reveals.

I He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet. . . . —"Preface," 1855 Whitman's "Preface" to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass remains the most important single document in American poetics. Precisely because it calls for a native strain of American poetry which would surpass the worn out limits of traditional, i.e., European poetry, American poets return to it again and again to find renewal for their own program for poetry. Roy Harvey Pearce's fine essay in Historicism Once More, "Whitman and O u r Hope for Poetry," points out that Modernist American poets, [133]

Walt Whitman Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, found in Whitman a figure of the lonely poet struggling to define a place for himself in a world essentially hostile to poetry. They tried to separate the prophet and politician f r o m the "shape-shifter" who irrevocably altered the patterns of English verse. Essentially, as Pearce argues, "Their Whitman was the lonely Adamic figure—in Emerson's phrase, the self against the w o r l d . " 6 M o r e recent American poets have another interpretation of Whitman which is largely a reaction against that of Eliot. Their concern is to find in Whitman as source a poet w h o revitalizes the idea of poetry's intimate relationship to the ecological and political structure of the nation and the world. Again as Pearce argues, Duncan and his contemporaries are attracted to Whitman because he asks the necessary poetic question: " W h a t . . . were the conditions which would have to obtain if the land were to be restored to productive order?" 7 In effect, the importance of this question denies Whitman the Adamic a u t o n o m y which M o d e r n and formalist analyses of his texts usually claim as his major achievement. His primary concern for the outside world, the direction of his poetry toward this fundamantal, "pre-political" 8 recognition of the role of the poet in the world, throws into doubt the interpretation of Whitman as totally free and independent creator of absolute novelties. 9 It also throws into s o m e d o u b t the centrality which Adamic interpretations normally impose upon the idea of " s e l f ' in Whitman's verse and suggests that a m u c h m o r e complex relationship between " s e l f " and " o t h e r " is at the "heart" or "origin" of his poetry. 1 0 R . W . B . Lewis's treatment of Whitman in The American Adam is probably the paradigm of all Modernist interpretations of Whitman. T h e fundamental "mystification" of Lewis's misreading lies in his assumption of the possibility of absolute novelty, of freedom f r o m the past and tradition, of a h u m a n p o tential for absolute beginnings at any time. Lewis's misreading emerges f r o m his disguised N e w Critical presupposition that language magically can free itself and its user from the immediate historical past either to return to some ahistorical scene which actually transcends time—Eliade's ilio tempore11—or simply to [134]

Walt Whitman begin again, free of historical consequences. In other words, the N e w Critical insistence upon the ability of the poet as ironist to choose at any time f r o m an infinity of possibles unrestricted by historical actuality and the ecstatic temporal structure of Dasein is transferred in Lewis's study of Whitman to the m y t h of the American Adam w h o is free of Europe, its traditions, its language, its rhetoric, and its failures. T o s o m e degree similar assumptions underlie all interpretations of Whitman which see him in an exclusively American context. They habitually presuppose as fact not only Whitman's success in freeing himself absolutely f r o m the past, but the very possibility of such an escape. T h e basically N e w Critical assumptions behind the Adamic interpretation of Whitman can be made clear in a look at a few passages f r o m Lewis. T h e strategy which Lewis assigns to Whitman is essentially a mythic attempt to overcome time by returning to the point when man exists out of history in an Unfällen state: In the poetry of Walt Whitman, the hopes which until now had expressed themselves in terms of progress crystallized all at once in a complete recovery of the primal perfection. In the early poems Whitman accomplished the epochal return by huge and almost unconscious leaps. In later poems he worked his way more painstakingly up the river of history to its source. (ΛΑ, 42) . . . his ambition [is] to reach behind tradition to find and assert nature untroubled by art, to re-establish the natural Unfällen man in the living hour. Unfällen man is, properly enough, unclothed as well; the convention of cover came in with the Fall. (AA, 43) 12 T h e return to mythic origins behind tradition allows the poet to feel free of time and all its psychological effects and artistic demands; it obliterates m e m o r y as a result of doing away with time: Whitman's hope was unspoiled by memory. . . . While European romanticism continued to resent the effect of time, Whitman was announcing that time had only just begun. . . . It [135]

Walt Whitman was this that Whitman had the opportunity to dramatize; and it was this that gave Leaves of Grass its special quality of a Yankee Genesis; a new account of the creation of the world—the creation, that is, of a new world; an account this time with a happy ending for Adam. (A A, 45) Poetically, this creation of a n e w world free of the past allows Whitman to create absolutely new poems, with a new language, about n e w experiences: How can absolute novelty be communicated? (AA, 42) Nor is there, in Leaves of Grass, any complaint about the weight or intrusion of the past; in Whitman's view the past had been so effectively burned away that it had, for every practical purpose, been forgotten altogether. In his own recurring figure, the past was already a corpse; it was on its way out the door to the cemetery; Whitman watched it absent-mindedly, and turned at once to the living reality. (AA, 44) The exalted mind carried . . . with it a conviction of absolute novelty. (AA, 46) T h e basic similarities of the presuppositions behind Lewis' analysis of Whitman and those of the N e w Critics and other ironists indicate the degree to which even Whitman's defenders have misread him under the influence of the antihistorical, antiexistential impulse of M o d e r n American criticism. A closer look at Whitman's "Preface" exhibits Whitman's constant concern with the "presence" of the past, his awareness of the basically historical nature of man, w h o cannot escape his past and tradition— especially if he hopes to have a future—and his expressed desire not be bury the dead, but to stand " t h e m again on their feet" (LG, Ρ, 718). Lewis can analyze Whitman in these terms because to s o m e extent the poet is amenable to a logocentric language which attempts to find a firm, nonhistorical base for poetry and h u m a n affairs. In fact, Harold Bloom makes explicit and extends the critical analysis of such logocentric language which is only i m -

[136]

Walt Whitman plicit in Lewis. Bloom sees Whitman as the Emersonian poet, which implies, according to Bloom, a "peculiarly American recentering" of the logos as incarnate word, in opposition to the "deconstruction" or "destruction" of the logos as transcendent center (MM, 176). As I have shown in m y first chapter, Bloom argues that the presence of the voice "over the scene of writing" "remains stubbornly logocentric" (MM, 176). As Kabbalist, Bloom insists on the priority of the self-presence of voice as privileged logos over the absence of writing as destructive discourse. In effect, Bloom agrees with Derrida's basic analysis that voice is logocentric while writing is essentially deconstruct!ve. For this reason, the obviously "oral" Whitman, the singer of songs w h o discourses liberally and apparently spontaneously, must for Bloom represent the antidestructive forces of the ontotheological tradition of metaphysics. Paradoxically, both Lewis and Bloom conclude that Whitman is in a way free of time, out of history, but f r o m different, in fact, antithetical positions. For Lewis, Whitman's absolute departure f r o m the tradition, his Adamic independence, frees h i m totally from the past and history; for Bloom, Whitman's imitations of the logocentric tradition, particularly his imitation of Emerson, his commitment to the priority of imagination over world, establishes both his priority over nature and over the precedence of other poets and texts in history. 1 3 But f r o m either perspective on Whitman, it is the logocentric, i.e., timeless, centered discourses of his critics which somehow manage to remove him f r o m any direct involvement in history and f r o m any direct, creative confrontation with his past, his tradition. Because Bloom sees all poems "as instances of the will to utter" (WS, 393), he cannot recognize h o w Whitman's poetry is essentially a generous, projective dis-closure of past forms. Bloom's trope of speech is p o w e r and will whereas Whitman's trope, like Heidegger's, is care. Rather than Heideggerean "discovery," Bloom suggests that "surprise" is the defining trope of American poetry. O n c e again, by looking at this figure of "surprise" in the context of my previous discussion of Bloom and the [137]

Walt Whitman N e w Critics, w e can see that Bloom's troping on American poetry is conditioned by his critical, subjective need to lie against time and reestablish the possibility of " n e w beginnings": "Surprise," as Emerson uses it, does not seem to mean to encounter suddenly or unexpectedly, or to take or to be taken unaware. It means for him the pathos of Power, the sudden manifestation of the vital will. It means Victory and ecstasy, a seizure, as in the etymology of the word. Is it not the most American of tropes for poetic power? . . . For surprise is the American poetic stance, in the peculiar sense of surprise as the poet's Will-to-Power over anteriority and over the interpretation of his own poem. (WS, 5-6) I do not intend to deny the utility of these metaphors for reading Whitman, but I would like to suggest that, like the n o w familiar rhetoric of the Adamic critics, they are willfully and consciously blind to the important temporal structure of Whitman's poems. I also want to suggest that it is not the sublime seduction offered by the illusion of absolute beginnings, of "successive rebegettings" (PR, 243), projected by a subjective will to power that marks Whitman's major achievement. O n the contrary, it is Whitman's destruction of the Gnostic priority of " s e l f " that gives his best poetry its most generous attitudes toward the past, toward the future, and toward others. In other words, I am refusing the Bloomian argument that says one forgets the self only to augment the self, to be powerfully victorious over time and nature. Bloom characterizes the "American Sublime" this way: The Emersonian repressiveness attains to a discontinuity with everything that is anterior, and in doing so it accomplishes or prepares for a reversal in which the self is forgotten . . . and yet through seeing introjects the fathering force of anteriority. By seeing the transparency, the poet of the American Sublime contains the father-god, and so augments the poetic self even as he remembers to forget that self. (PR, 247-48) This figure is analogous in its interpretive power to the Freudian device of counterformation since it empowers the reversal of all [138]

Walt Whitman other figures. O n e cannot disprove this figure nor argue its decidability; one can only suggest the subjective, methodological interests at stake in its invocation. Having already d o n e this in m y discussion of B l o o m in chapter one, I otter here a reading of Whitman which, by refusing to yield to this figure, attends to the temporality of his poetry. Whitman's 1855 "Preface" lends support to b o t h of these critical theories. B u t as Paul de M a n points out for all critical language, this "Preface" possesses a structure of blindness and insight, or in Heidegger's terms, of an error needed to reveal truth simultaneously, i.e., destructively. T h e 1855 "Preface" begins with a statement of the relationship of the American poet to the past. Lewis sees Whitman's description of the tradition as " c o r p s e " as p r o o f of the poet's view that he can and m u s t cut himself off completely f r o m the past. Yet, W h i t m a n ' s initial statement indicates exactly the opposite and calls into question the possibility of reading the " c o r p s e " metaphor literally as Lewis does: America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . . accepts the lesson with calmness . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms . . . perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house . . . perceives that it waits a Iitde while in the door . . . that it was fittest for its days . . . that its action has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for his days. (LG, Ρ, 711) Leaves of Grass actually begins not only b y asserting the "death" of the past poetical f o r m s of defunct political and religious customs, but also by quietly indicating the American poet's relationship to that past. In effect, the American poet is the "heir" of the tradition, not a rebellious child. H e is m o s t importantly the place where the n e w life of mankind will find expression in n e w forms. A transference of poetic energy has occurred; the f o r m s of [139]

Walt Whitman the tradition have lost their meaning and power and are no longer equal to the new world which throbs with the unstructured, unhabitual lives and problems the old world has effectively forgotten. Whitman's metaphor insists, furthermore, upon the European loss of a vitality, of a life itself which has been transferred to the West. Although from the beginning, the "Preface" establishes a more complex relationship to the past than the simple Adamic model which Lewis suggests, it gives no evidence of any creative use of the past as a program for the American poet until further into the essay. Indeed, some argument could be made along the lines of the Adamic model for Whitman's denial of the past. For example: No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark and can have the best authority the cheapest . . . namely from its own soul. [. . .] —As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! (LG, Ρ, 712) But this particular disclaimer of the priority of the past—which Harold Bloom would undoubtedly see as Whitman's attempt to disown his father—is specifically a rejection of a simple return to the past, of an attempt to move literature out of the here and now of the poet's language to re-cover the mythical, i.e., literary records which have no relationship to the vitality of the present. In other words, this is a rejection of all naive attempts to move out of the historical moment back in time to the "mythical." It is a rejection of all attempts to "re-collect" the past not from the perspective of the present with an eye to the future, but merely from the perspective of the past, of what is not only habitual, but dead. It is, in effect, a denial of the efficacy of the imitative orientation which lies behind both Walter Bate's and Harold Bloom's theories of poetic creation and poetic history. Such imitation is a "re-cover-ing," an adding of another layer of the habitual to what already obscures the vitality and processes of discovery [140]

Walt Whitman which define life in the States, which, in fact, are the "essence" of America: "As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery and what has transpired since in North and South America were less than the small theatre of the antique or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!" (LG, Ρ, 712. My italics.) America is the product and process of dis-cover-y. The rhetorical opposition of openness and discovery not only with antiquity but theatricality indicates that the cover-up is, to some extent, defined by the "dramatics," the "literariness" of the past, which obscures the antithetical notion of ongoing, human processes in the world of actuality—a world, that is, defined by the sense of place and " n o w " which the entire Leaves of Grass insists upon. This early paragraph from the "Preface" not only further questions the Adamic or New Critical reading of Whitman, but it also throws some doubt on the correlate idea that insofar as Whitman is concerned with the past he attempts to return to some primordial "origins" which precede the fall into history. He fully rejects the movement back to the mythical as another form of ahistorical, or inauthentic, recovery. His insistence that "reminiscences" will not "suffice" certainly not only attacks the nostalgic "Euro-philes" in the States, but also the PlatonicHegelian notion of "recollection." The American poet cannot adequately testify to the defining quality of his nation—discovery and openness—while partaking in the luxury of "recollection" which, as Kierkegaard's analysis of Hegel and parody of the aesthetes shows, removes the poet from his actuality and "returns" him to an aesthetic "scene" constituted by the imaginative, selective purgation of memory of all unpleasant and disturbing details. 14 In other words, a reflective art which absorbs the poet and his audience in the transformation of the past into pleasing objects of contemplation is totally inadequate to the vitality of American poetry. This assault on the idea of "reminiscence" is, paradoxically, perhaps the ultimate attack on the Adamic myth. Insofar as the very possibility of the idea of returning to the past as a paradise—either an actual return to a mythic rime before the [1411

Walt Whitman Fall or an aesthetic return to a pleasing scene of the personal or cultural past—is denied, then the total inadequacy of the AdamicEdenic myth/metaphor to the analysis of Whitman becomes obvious. In fact, the broader and more basic myth of the Fall itself, and its Miltonic-American version, the Fortunate Fall, is also completely destroyed as a possible basis upon which to criticize Whitman. D e Man suggests that most criticism is deconstructed by the literature it attempts to analyze, and quite clearly, an important, innovative, i.e., discovering author like Whitman can be seen to destroy the normal varieties of literary interpretation which habitually build up around him. The "normal" attitude toward such writers which assumes some privileged position in further critical discussion of them must be violently destroyed if further insight into these authors is to result, and not merely inadequate reminiscences of the prior "true" interpretations. Whitman insists that the future forms of the new American art will be different from those of the past. In fact, his periphrastic description of this new poetry can be reclaimed by employing Paul de Man's heuristic term "indirect" in an analysis of Whitman's claims for a native poetry: the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and has vista. Here comes one among the wellbeloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms. (LG, Ρ, 714) De Man's analysis of Rousseau indicates that Rousseau is fully aware of the potential for being misunderstood which lies within all literary language. In order to make this clear and in order to avoid the inescapable mystification of poetic language, Rousseau employs an "indirect" method. Commenting on Derrida's read[142]

Walt Whitman ing of Rousseau, de Man explains this procedure: " W h a t happens in Rousseau is exactly what happens in Derrida: a vocabulary of substance and of presence is no longer used declaratively but rhetorically, for the very reasons that are being (metaphorically) stated" (BI, 138-39). As I have suggested in m y o w n destruction of Lewis' N e w Critical Adamic reading of Whitman, Lewis has misconceived the language of the "Preface" as literal truth and not as the rhetorical statement of a self-conscious writer w h o s e prose works in a destructive way. In other words, the clear c o m ments which Whitman makes concerning the " a b a n d o n m e n t " of the past and the need for an authentically American poetry are all undercut by the " m o r e tentative utterances" (BI, 102) which reveal the important connections to the past and tradition W h i t man insists upon. Considered historically, Whitman's "Preface" faces a unique situation: he cannot directly call for a m o r e creative understanding of the past since the habitual m o d e of then current American poetry, in fact, stands in an imitative, derivative relationship to old British forms. As a result of the paradoxical situation in which Whitman finds himself, a direct request for an authentic look at or interpretation of the past would be misinterpreted, misconceived as further support for the already entrenched conservatism of American letters which Whitman propagandistically attacks elsewhere. Whitman can only bring his readers to understand what he wants to say by m o v i n g his language a little off center. B y calling for the blatant and absolute novelty which Lewis, a m o n g others, interprets as a literal program for poetry, Whitman assumes the risk of constant misinterpretation. Like Rousseau, like all major innovative writers, he is aware that he is necessarily doomed to constant misreadings. In fact, as Heidegger's theory of truth points out, such indirect use of language is a necessary strategy in the face of inevitable misreading. T o disclose something new, it must emerge f r o m something old. T r u t h comes from error, aletheia f r o m semblance, and so on. T h e " t r u t h " of this more complicated, indirect method of dealing with the past [143]

Walt Whitman is purposely covered over with a lie, a call for the undesired and impossible, so that the "truth" may in fact begin to emerge when the text is read indirecdy, i.e., rhetorically and destructively. This analysis of the key term "indirection" can be extended by an examination of another key in Whitman's poetics, "destruction": "The power to destroy or remould is freely used by [the poet] but never the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose superior models and prove himself by every step he takes he is not what is wanted" (LG, Ρ, 715). The rhetorical identification of "destroy" and "remould" as well as its differentiation from any idea of "attack," overcomes the notion that this destruction is, in Whitman, a reduction to "nullity." Once again, a naive or direct reading would suggest the Adamic myth, a return to the garden by an elimination of the past, by making a new "beginning." Yet, Whitman does say that the "past is past." But this too can be interpreted in the light of the larger rhetorical structure and intent of this passage. If in fact the past is gone forever, then the poet's power to destroy is redundant and unnecessary. Also, precisely insofar as the "re-" of "re-mould" is purposeful and Whitman has not misspoken himself, then the pastness of the past, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, does not deny its "presence." That is, unless Whitman errs in explicidy ascribing to the poet the power to destroy and remould, the phrase "What is past is past," cannot be taken in any direct Adamic way. Another interpretation must be found to complete the understanding of the passage. The coupling of "destroy" with "remould" suggests the possibility of treating the past in such a way that by "destroying" it the poet must "expose superior models." Whitman's use of the language of disclosure in the context of poetic destruction reinforces the interpretation that the authentic relationship to the past is one of "re-newal," "re-trieve," and "dis-covery." In perhaps the most important passage in the 1855 "Preface," from which I have drawn the epigraph of this section, Whitman explicidy, but briefly, insists upon precisely this destructive, retrieving orientation toward the dead past. I quote the [144]

Walt Whitman entire passage here because it presents other issues which I intend to discuss in the context of Whitman's poetics: Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time. What is the purpose must surely be there and the clue of it must be there . . . . and the faintest indication is the indication of the best and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet . . . . he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson . . . . he places himself where the future becomes present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions . . . he finally ascends and finishes all . . . he exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond . . . . he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown . . . by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. (LG, Ρ, 718) This passage brings together the ideas of poetic indirection, of poetic "re-trieve," and of the necessarily temporal, historical consciousness and project of the poet. Because the past, present, and future do not exist independendy, the American poet w h o hopes to build a tradition out of the present for the future must begin by rediscovering what the n o w "defunct" tradition of Europe offers. The "lesson" the poet learns is of the failure of the past, why it is no longer adequate, what America must do difFerendy to succeed. Whitman's temporal sense is acute. Indeed, he not only insists upon the temporal awareness of past, present, and future, but claims that the American poet's success requires that his poems, their forms, be "informed" by the laws of time which [145]

Walt Whitman govern nature. Since Whitman differentiates American from European verse by claiming "vista" as the essential element of a native poetry, his assertion in the quoted passage of the connection between time and poetry clearly indicates the close relationship which exists between the historical nature of man and the temporal laws of poetry. "Vista" indicates process, futurity, scope, change, ongoing dis-covery and exposure, and it recalls Heidegger's understanding of "sight" as retrieval. European poetry, on the other hand, is direct and descriptive; it illustrates, and "that finishes the verse." Thus, it can be argued that American poetry differentiates itself by never "finishing" its process. In other words, for a native poetry to be successful it must be temporal, indirect—i.e., historically aware and destructive—and end-less. Not only can poetry never completely separate itself from its past tradition, but, in order to affect its audience, to change the character of its readers to give them some awareness of the temporal nature of their being, it must "compete with the laws that pursue and follow time." Poetry must have an essentially temporal structure which is marked by "vista," by open-ended discovery which is the structural and methodological equivalent of "America," as both reality and as metaphor for the vital world of poetic concerns. There are two points of focus then in the discussion of this passage, one is the poem as temporal event or action and the second is the poet as temporal, historical being. The two cannot be divided without violating Whitman's intent here, since the poem as process emerges only from the fact that human life is historical. Yet, the formal elements of the poem make a claim on the reader just as the fundamental temporality of existence makes claims on the poet. Whitman's sense of the poet's "poetic" history, that is, of his place in relationship to the literary past, is crucial but not absolutely fundamental. There is a more basic temporal structure within the poet, within the Dasein, which in effect makes possible or requires an awareness of the literary past and tradition. Whitman insists upon the American poem emerging from the [146]

Walt Whitman experience of the individual ego. Since the poem must follow the laws of time, it follows that temporality is for Whitman located essentially within the individual. T h e poet defines the potential not only for recording the present and examining the past to expose f r o m within it the vital laws habit has obscured, but the poet functions as potentiality itself. H e is the possibility for discovery and dis-closure. H e is the means for opening up the future and demonstrating the nature of man's being as potentiality. T h e poet not only testifies to man's being present in the world, but "he places himself where the future becomes present," at the point where "sight" and "eyes" are retrieved f r o m metaphysics and coercion. 1 5 In other words, the poet lives on the verge, on the boundary between what-is and has been within life and tradition and what is not yet; he creates in the gap between the actuality defined by the past and present and the potentialities which the future, growing out of the past and present with which it is conjoined, presents. Yet, this word "presents" is out of place in Whitman's rhetoric. Indeed, the poet w h o sees the farthest, w h o reaches into the mysterious realms of death and Being is faced with the ineffable, with the "un-presentable." Indirecdy, giving a "clue" here and there—and again "clue" can be read in terms of both Heidegger and Derrida's concept of the "trace" 1 6 —the poet "exhibits the pinnacles that no m a n can tell what they are for or what is beyond. . . . " A s Heidegger's analysis of Stefan George's " T h e W o r d " makes clear, the poet ultimately is confronted by the failure of language to articulate his final vision of what the ordinary and habitual obscures. 1 7 In a similar w a y , Whitman's vision culminates in n o Hegelian synthesis or positivistic telos. H e discovers so much of what the vista reveals that he can only indirecdy disclose those realms which are at the limits of his perception and language. Representation and signification both break d o w n when the poet successfully destroys enough of the traditional habits to encounter this mysterious limit of articulation. Perhaps all that the poet does finally encounter in this way is the failure of language, which reduces him to gesture and bod[147]

Walt Whitman ily expression. Whitman seems to suggest this in the next passage: "[The poet] is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown . . . by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years." The poet moves beyond, transcends what the ordinary or habitual defines as life and at that moment is reduced to a nonverbal being. The necessary shared basis of language, its common referents and significations, disintegrate. In a similar way, this passage can be seen as the moment of the poet's departure from life itself, i.e., of his physical and imaginative death. The ambiguity of the potential observer's interpretive response to the smile or frown reinforces the Heideggerean sense of death being forever my own. It also suggests the discomfort which the presence of death in the habitual society creates in its members. But most importantly, this passage indicates what effects the poet has upon the ordinary world when he exhibits something which is beyond that world's norm. Whitman's "Preface" contains a detailed attack on the bourgeois world's values and "desperate revolt at the close of a life" (LG, Ρ, 725), which supports the idea that his poetry is meant to unsettle and disrupt the common life of the ordinary man and not merely to record the world of nineteenth-century America. Because of the direct involvement of the historical poet in his poetry, his texts are intended to have historical, kinetic, affective value. Unlike the New Critical art which Stephen Dedalus describes, Whitman's poems reveal to the reader the radically temporal nature of his experience and being. Whitman's poems disrupt past texts to reveal what they have concealed in order to disassociate the reader from the ordinary world and habitual modes of poetry. Whitman's verse is designed to convert and unsettle the reader by destroying his habits and his literature. In place of a literature which is direct, descriptive, and finished, Whitman offers the indirect, the destructive, the unending, and the process-ional. In an important passage warning his reader of the risk and [148]

Walt W h i t m a n d a n g e r s inherent in reading Leaves of Grass, W h i t m a n declares his intent t o write a n d traditional, t e m p o r a l p o e m s : A great poem is no finish to a man or a woman but rather a beginning. Has anyone fancied he could sit at last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and realize and be content and full? T o no such terminus does the great poet bring . . . he brings neither cessation or sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained . . . . thenceforward is no rest . . . . they see the space and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums. The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars and learns one of the meanings. N o w there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos . . . . the elder encourages the younger and shows him how . . . they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars and sweeps through the ceaseless rings and shall never be quiet again. (LG, Ρ, 729. My italics) Leaves of Grass is designed to j o l t the reader o u t of his c o m p l a cency, his " f a t certainty." It is t o unsettle his p r e c o n c e p t i o n s which, once destroyed, appear only as habits. M o s t i m p o r t a n t l y , the p o e m is to have an emotional and ontological effect: it is t o disorient a n d cause anxiety b y revealing the basis o f h u m a n being in a radically u n g r o u n d e d sense of process, action, and endless, nonteleological time. T h e text emerges o u t of the process o f a life in time, o u t of an awareness o f literary history and the idea of destruction, and o u t of a recognition of the need to d r i v e m e n a n d w o m e n o u t of their habitual life patterns in o r d e r t o m a i n t a i n life, to assure o n g o i n g dis-closure w h i c h is the definition of t r u t h and authenticity. T h e p o e m s assault the traditional ontological a s s u m p t i o n s o f presence, certainty, and rest as the g r o u n d of all being. T h e y destroy the assumptions of arché and telos, while they deconstruct the R o m a n t i c m e t a p h o r of the j o u r n e y and quest. In a w a y al[149]

Walt Whitman most as completely and radically as the absurd dramatists of the twentieth century, Whitman violently drives his readers into a disorientation by breaking down their claims for rest and composure, by writing a poetry without end and with intense kinetic value. In Stephen Dedalus' terms, Whitman's art would be both pornography and propaganda, since it is intended to attract and repulse. Perhaps Whitman's fundamental poetic insight for the new American poetry lies in seeing it as a means of revitalizing the awareness of basic human nature: life is process and change; man is historical and temporal; literature becomes habitual and comforting and, therefore, only a semblance of itself. American literature must disclose this basic truth, indirectly, by opening up the past to reveal the fundamentally temporal being of life and art which the logocentric tradition's emphasis on telos and stasis has obscured. In the act of this destruction, the new poems will record these basic poetic imaginings while driving the audience into a confrontation with them by creating an anxiety which the audience cannot ignore. The forms of the poems will not end or comfort, will not simplify, and will not provide aesthetically the evidence for the assumed ontological security which habitually grounds all "normative" worlds of ordinary experience. Whitman's prose does not, however, seem to completely escape from the habitual and common to the degree that would appear to be necessary to his entire project. While his theory of indirection and his comments about the "clue" of poetic intention caution a reader against misreading Whitman by literalizing his work and suggest that even his most "obvious" myths might be examples of his deconstructive, indirect rhetoric, there are elements of traditional language, usually associated with Emersonian idealism, which appear to ground and motivate the writing. These mystified linguistic structures and tropes are in direct opposition to the destructive impulse I have been exhibiting in the "Preface." The idea of historical interpretation could be used to destroy the mystified elements in Whitman, and the theory of indirection could be used to suggest that Whitman is not mys[1501

Walt Whitman tified in these idealistic matters, but rather that he is employing such language against itself, in the context of the theory of destruction, in order to overcome the Emersonian version of traditional rhetoric. Yet, the all important "clue" to this destruction seems to me to be missing. It appears that Whitman undoubtedly is mystified about the possibility of re-presenting the "presence" of the "Soul," of the correspondence between this world and another spiritual realm. H e seems unaware that such a belief in the centrality of a transcendent realm is in direct opposition to his discussion of ongoing dis-covery as "ceasless rings," which he suggests are to dis-orient and unsettle the habitual. While the "Preface" is based upon a destructive theory that language becomes habitual and comforting because dead and unexamined, Whitman's own language of "presence," of "the unshakable order of the universe" (LG, Ρ, 726), remains an unexamined trope derived most immediately from Emerson. Whitman denies the idea of arché, of any absolute beginning or first principle: " n o result exists now without being f r o m its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot." The absence of a stable origin ungrounds history and anthropology and the centrality of all causal systems. Yet Whitman does not question the idealistic myth which assumes the unity and integrity of "History" to be a whole that can be seen "all at once": "and if to [the poet] is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods [. . . ]—let him merge in the general run and wait his development" (LG, Ρ, 728). While the attack on arché and telos destroys precisely the poet's privilege to see all of history at once, to recognize how history "is held by the ductile anchors of life" (LG, Ρ, 728), Whitman does not, within the immediate context, in the place or moment of this statement, give any evidence for taking these statements "metaphorically." His seeming belief in the "truth" of the transcendental language is not undercut by its j u x taposition to the language of destruction. In a blinded rhetoric, peculiarly like the one in Husserl's |151]

Walt Whitman "Philosophy and the Crisis of European H u m a n i t y , " which Paul de Man takes as the classic example of such rhetoric, Whitman too seems not to realize fully that the critique of habitual language which he insists is necessary to founding American poetry is self-referential (BI, 14ff). For example, in a statement which explains the significance of exact science as a deconstructive, demystifying force, Whitman writes: " T h e whole theory of the special and supernatural and all that was twined with it or educed out of it departs as a d r e a m " (LG, Ρ, 721). Yet, Whitman finds in this same science some "reason" to justify the transcendental ideal of spirit infusing all matter: What has ever happened. . . . what happens and whatever may or shall happen, the vital laws enclose all [. . . .] any miracle of affairs or persons inadmissable in the vast clear scheme where every motion and every spear of grass and the frames and spirits of men and women and all that concerns them are unspeakably perfect miracles all referring to all and each distinct and in its place. (LG, Ρ, 721) Fundamentally, this assurance of divine order undercuts the very possibility of writing a poetry which could in any way drive its reader into periods of unrest, into "ceasless rings." In fact, the miraculous order Whitman proclaims here is the apotheosis of the traditional language of the West. It guarantees all action by providing a firm basis f r o m which man can proceed out into the world. It becomes not only a center, a proposition and belief which is not involved in the play of the texts, but it acts as an arché, a beginning, a source, a first principle which conceals the real risk of the constant restlessness which Whitman himself describes. Examples of Whitman's use of this traditional language of presence in the form of Emersonian transcendentalism could be mutliplied. Most importantly, however, a few examples provide evidence to indicate the opposite of what Paul de Man claims for poets in Blindness and Insight: not all writers are completely demystified. Some, like Whitman, require at least partial destruc[152]

Walt Whitman tion. In fact, as the discussion of Heidegger has shown, only insofar as there is semblance can there be truth; only insofar as a writer errs can he destroy, can he insist upon the démystification of language. Whitman is not radical enough. He does not pierce through to the fundamental nothingness which all literary language conceals and reveals. But he has begun the American tradition, which in many ways has become the Modern and Postmodern one: an attempt to found a new tradition for the future cannot proceed from a naive belief in the possibility of absolute, new beginnings. Such ideals are hopeless and merely aesthetic, in Kierkegaard's sense of the term, i.e., an attempt to transcend actuality for a verbal world of infinite possibilities. Indeed, Whitman's "Preface" destroys the very myth of misinterpretation which was to grow u p around him. H e shows that the idea of the new, or what de Man using Nietzsche in Blindness and Insight calls the " M o d e r n , " is only a myth. As Heidegger proves, one's past lies in front of one and not behind. We are already our tradition and attempts to escape this fundamental fact by ignoring history, its consequences, and actuality itself are only mistaken attempts to become like God. Quite ironically, in many ways, Whitman's "Preface" can be said to be the manifesto of the tradition. For it is only by setting the past on its feet again by disclosing what it has concealed or forgotten that the new tradition can begin. Whitman's ideas parallel those of Heidegger on the "retrieve." Although Whitman seems hardly as self-conscious as Heidegger, his own program for American art—with its insistence upon this historicality of poet and poetry—certainly appears to foreshadow the more fully developed theories of "phenomenological destruction."

II Whitman's poetry as well as his program are transitional in an important sense: his work represents the beginnings of the Modern and Postmodern attempt to deconstruct archetypes, the first |153]

Walt Whitman sense that the tradition has failed and can no longer be seen as adequate to Modern life or art. But Whitman's poems, as I have tried to suggest in the context of the 1855 "Preface," are far from embodying the complete and radical deconstrucdon which one finds, for example, in Wallace Stevens. Whitman's deeply felt sense of the concrete historicity of the poet and his poems motivates his attack on a tradition which has become "ahistorical," which has not changed with the "dis-covery" of America and science. Yet, while Whitman feels liberated by the radical freedom which he enjoys as a result of this Modern de-traditionalization, his life and work are marked by a strong, unquestioned attraction to the idea and belief in some controlling center, some radically unalterable ground upon which the poem, the structure, and the poet's own self may be built. Whitman's poetic deconstructions not only foreshadow in method Heidegger's phenomenologically destructive retrieve, but they are peculiarly similar to Jacques Derrida's "decenterings" of the ideas of beginning, end, and self. In versions of the tradition, these terms have functioned as privileged "centers" for philosophical and literary structures, but all betray a belief in a transcendent presence which lies outside the theoretical and ontological realm of doubt and questioning. Derrida's concept of center is of value in reading Whitman's poems in this context, so at the risk of some redundancy, I will reintroduce some material from "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In this essay, Derrida points out that what a "center" "is" is less important than how it functions: The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle o f the structure would limit what w e might call the play of the structure. B y orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of the structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. [154]

Walt W h i t m a n Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurally. 18 T h e center of any structure (and a structure may be a building, a philosophical system, a g r o u p of myths, or a poem) is the u n questioned a priori about which all else circles. It guides change, but is itself free f r o m change. In most traditional systems, especially in the West, it takes the f o r m of transcendence. Despite its f o r m , however, it always provides man with certitude, with the evidence of something beyond change which controls life and prohibits chance. I will assume along with Derrida, for the purposes of this chapter, that Nietzsche m u s t be pointed to as the definite point at which M o d e r n i s m begins and the tradition of presence is brought into question. As b o t h Derrida and Paul de M a n argue, Nietzsche's major contribution to Western thought is an attack u p o n the f o r m s and premises of that thought itself. In "Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, " de M a n demonstrates that Nietzsche deconstructs the myth and metaphor of evolution and generation, that is, he discloses the discontinuities of literary structures modelled u p o n the generic construct. 1 9 Nietzsche simultaneously de-creates the positivistic m y t h of historical p r o g ress. In both critiques, Nietzsche attacks the concepts of arché and telos which d o m i n a t e Western metaphysics. T h e concepts of beginning and end function, as Derrida argues, as "centers." T h e beginning, clearly, is a point of departure, a sound base f r o m which all else emerges and back beyond which we cannot go. If we try to violate the beginning, w e find only Aristotle's and Aquinas' infinite regressions. T h e end, or telos, of course, is a [155]

Walt Whitman certain, stable projection in the future toward which we travel. Like the ending of a well-made fiction,20 like the paradisal goal of apocalyptic philosophies, such as the heaven of Christianity, any telos is a defined point of certain arrival about which all of h u m a n action and history centers. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, according to Derrida, see this traditional Western center only as a means of eliminating anxiety and preventing risk. In each traditional system, whether poetic or philosophical, a center exists about which the rest of the structure is suspended. Therefore, all structures before the end of the nineteenth century are "centered structures." These exist until then because the need and faith for a center is so completely absorbing that its very "presence" as a primary assumption of thought is not m a d e explicit. Exposure requires first a sense that the tradition has failed and then a deconstructive analysis to exhibit it fully. H o w e v e r , as Derrida argues, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche comes to see that man always centers his structures for a reason, namely that he uses them as existential anaesthetics: The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. 21 As Derrida defines the event, recognition of and release f r o m the centered structures can issue in t w o reactions. Although the decadents, the symbolists, and ironists assume a world-weary, despairing attitude in the face of change and death unexplained by a centered m y t h — w h a t Derrida calls "Rousseauist"—Nietzsche and Whitman joyously affirm the freedom to act and discover which this decentering gives them: [156]

Walt Whitman Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security.22 T h e centerless nature of Whitman's art and the j o y o u s decreative process which he employs in it are most visible in t w o of his major preoccupations: the poet or man as child and the ever ongoing, unending world of history imaged as j o u r n e y . But before I begin a discussion of Leaves of Grass by examining these items, I must briefly return to Whitman's still mystified, logocentric language. There is in Leaves of Grass, especially in the later poems, an insistence upon the existence of god. As Louis Martz puts it: "his tendency to make abstract assertions about the future grew, until he weakened his essential poetic power, his ability to deal concretely and dynamically with the world about him. . . . His 'flights of a fluid and swallowing soul' may fly out too often beyond the human horizon into a place where the air is too thin for p o e t r y . " 2 3 I d o not wish to argue that Whitman abandons his early position of freedom to assume a safer stance in a world guaranteed by a transcendence. Martz puts the case too simply. Clearly, the problem of transcendence exists in the p o e m f r o m the very beginning, and indeed, the early radical freedom continues, although somewhat abated, to the very end. As Charles Metzger argues, Whitman at times turns toward god for assurance, but he primarily, especially in his early poetry, relies on self. 24 Whitman, as a transitional figure, k n o w s the risks of misinterpretation he takes in carrying to its extreme the metaphor of the N e w Adam. But, by assuming the Adamic m y t h as a rhetorical stance, he is able to destroy the habitual and mystified tradi[157]

Walt Whitman tion throughout. As a result, the benefits, joys, and pleasures of the potential freeplay fascinate him. At the same time, however, he recognizes that he is losing surety when he pursues this programmatic destruction. Much of the best poetry of Leaves modulates dialectically between these two poles, and some of it is the direct result of tension between their associated antinomies. The major impediment to seeing the fundamentally "centerless" nature of Whitman's poetry is the tendency of critics to see his insistence on "self" or "personality" as a new center. Robert Spiller's description of the relation of Whitman's self to the universe is typical of such ego-logocentric criticism: Given his idea of Personality—so close to Emerson's conception of the Over-Soul—Whitman's thought moves outward in concentric circles from a concentration on the abstract value of his own self. . . . this idea of self moves from its fully realized inner core to the extreme outward limits of cosmic unity. 25

According to Spiller, the entire poem, at least as finally arranged, moves from a concentration on self to some sort of unity with suprahuman forces. The series of concentric circles would and does suggest a centered structure, and no doubt Whitman would have us see the similarity. Even Metzger thinks that Whitman's "conception of unity . . . centers around his personal identity." 2 6 This, of course, is only a narcissistic variation on the Adamic metaphor. The self is, in fact, frequently portrayed as radically separated from all firm bases, striking out ex nihilo upon the open road. Equally as often, self and nation appear as the "result" of an infinitely long and rich past to whose origin Whitman never tries to penetrate. H e never confronts the universe from a panóptica! position of transcendence, but only from his limited, projective "vista." The critical "centering" of Whitman's self fails to consider his presentation of the self as an origin-less thing, unfounded on any secure basis, and it also ignores the open-ended quality of the poem's form and of the poetic journey. Furthermore, since Whitman identifies poet, poem, and nation, this centering process dis[158]

Walt Whitman counts his presentation of the radical novelty of America. It is also crucial that when Whitman does speak of the past and its relation to self and America, it is often to emphasize the indeterminate number of states, cultures, and men who, in fact, lead up to his own self and the United States. The self in this poem has no firm basis. One of Whitman's primary metaphors for this state is the romantic image of the innocent child. This metaphor is also a fine example of the deconstructive nature of Whitman's art. H e uses the metaphor of the child-artist, which William Wordsworth typifies in the Intimations Ode, but he shows the inefficacy of Wordsworth's presumed relation of child to light by using the metaphor in a way which disconnects the child from any source: There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, Or for many years, or stretching cycles of years. (LG, 364)

These lines introduce the typical romantic metaphor of the innocent child-poet-discoverer. If we assume Wordsworth's Ode to be paradigmatic, then Whitman's achievement becomes clearer. In Wordsworth's allegorical poem, of course, the child goes forth once, leaves light, the transcendent source of vision and understanding, and finds that the light fades as he grows older, until either death or the poetic renewal of light occurs by the agency of recollection. Whitman's child-poet goes "forth every day;" his departure is not marred by the sadness of loss, by the sense of a growing lack in life; rather, this child sympathetically identifies everyday with every object which he encounters in this world. These identifications are not momentary events; they are not instants to be recalled in later life in hope of renewal; rather, they become part of the self by entering permanently into the self. Whitman's child grows; he is not a static, unchangeable creature. He expands his [159]

Walt Whitman self by filling it with encounters with the outside world. In Georges Poulet's terminology, we might say that Whitman is trying to fill the infinite void within himself by internalizing all of the exterior world. 2 7 The movement in the poem follows this process of expansion as the child first internalizes the day and its events, and then, the commonplaces of nature, "The early lilies became part of this child" (LG, 364). His expansion continues as he experiences the seasons, the cycles of nature, and then the works of man. H o w ever, the quest metaphor of the Romantic hero is altered in "There was a child went forth." The poet-child's travel is not ideological, but process-ional. Regarding the "vista" reveals the limits of the horizon. Whitman's poem emphasizes the process of discovering objects in the world as well as the revelation that the questor himself is always in and of the world. This poem is a voyage of discovery by an "innocent" child into the "vistas" of life in nature, in America. The child's trip is always forward looking and he is never, like the persona of Wordsworth's Ode, attracted to the transcendent light lost in the fall into time. Finally, the movement of the poem returns the child and the reader to home. In the same way, Wordsworth's Ode returns us to a source of light, to his child's transcendent " h o m e . " 2 8 Wordsworth's language and vision appear to be radically logocentric. The Intimations Ode begins by recounting, by recollecting, the past in which all elements of nature "did seem/ Appatalled in celestial light" (1. 4). And as the poet grows older, as he loses his "innocence" and falls further into the world of matter, he realizes that "It is not now as it hath been of yore" (1. 6). The divine soul of an infant which related the poet to godhead is covered over with the passage of time and the accretion of experiences gathered in life's journey: "The things which I have seen I now can see no more" (1. 9). The poet's life in this poem is lived facing backward, recollecting the eternal and idyllic moment of the past life, perhaps even the divine moment of a life in another world. In the Phaedo,29 of course, Socrates lectures Simmias and Cebes upon the immortality of the spirit and the pre[1601

Walt Whitman existent soul. Socrates hopes to establish the theory of knowledge based upon recollection which justifies his own method of questioning as instruction. Wordsworth, however, is certainly aware of Socrates' description of the immortal soul: "Then, Simmias, our soul existed formerly, apart from our bodies, and possessed intelligence before they came into man's shape." 30 Philosophy is the process of attempting to regain the knowledge and glory of the soul prior to its reconnection with a human body. Indeed, life for Socrates, as Kierkegaard points out about him quite frequendy (CI, 121f), is lived as a recollection, that is, as an attempt to regain the perfection of a nontemporal, nonworldly state. Such an attempt is, of course, totally contrary to the ongoing process of uncovering, of disclosing the new which occurs in Heidegger's philosophical destruction and in Whitman's poems. The Socratic recollection looks solely to the past while Kierkegaardian repetition and the Heideggerean retrieve are directed towards the future by exposing what the past conceals. Wordsworth tries in the Intimations Ode to articulate the sense of the loss of this original presence: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

(11. 62-76)

|161]

Walt Whitman Just as Socrates realizes that as long as the soul is attached to the body (the philosopher should welcome death) recollection cannot be fully achieved, Wordsworth recognizes that he must look in the world for traces of what "exists" in the origin: ". . . find/ Strength in what remains behind" (1. 184). The Wordsworthian wanderer travels looking for revelations of the eternal moment in time. He turns not toward the things in nature for themselves, for the claims which their existences make upon his being, but to see in them the visionary evidence of the continued "existence" of that eternal, un-earthly, mode he has left behind. Wordsworth hopes to be able to go "home" again. Whitman, in his poem, however, identifies his child's home and parentage as distinctly human: His own parents, he that had father'd him and she that had conceiv'd him in her w o m b and birth'd him. They gave this child more of themselves than that, They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.

(LG, 365) This image of the poetic self's development and expansion, of its journey in experience, emphasizes the earthly roots of the self. It does not have its source in the transcendent nor in the certain. The poem refuses the language of presence. The poetic self is radically ungrounded in Whitman; there is no origin-al innocence lost in experience pursued by memory; rather, there is experience as absorption, the expansion of the self by generous sympathy as ideal. This process does not end in an integrated identity, a unified self, but rather in a clear perception that in the "fallen world" there are only "selves." Identity is not achieved through recollection; rather, difference remains in dispersal and delay. Furthermore, by insisting on the birth of this child, Whitman associates the image with the infinite regression of humanity into the past. The last lines of the poem make this clear: "These became part ofthat child who then went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day" {LG, 366). The tripartite, temporal rhetoric of this passage clearly echoes the [162]

Walt Whitman Christian praise of Christ w h o "always was, and always will be, forever and ever." T h e submerged religious r h y t h m does not i m part any note of divinity to the child. It only insists upon the never-ending "ek-static" process of encounter on the part of the artist-child w h o n o w and throughout history, f r o m n o beginning and to n o final end, always "goes f o r t h . " T h e lack of firm origin in Leaves of Grass is first suggested in " S o n g of M y s e l f ' : I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. (LG, 30) This is m o r e than a declaration of intent to concentrate on the world for subject matter; it is a manifesto of M o d e r n i s m . It announces Whitman's truly radical break f r o m the past. T h e topic of poetry is the present, the constantly changing encounters of the self with the world. Poetry emerges f r o m all this experience: Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. (LG, 30) These lines prefigure not only Williams' " n o ideas b u t in things" and the basic tenet of phenomenology, " t o the things them[163]

Walt Whitman selves," but also suggest Charles Olson's complex notions of history and vision which I will develop in my last chapter. Although Whitman announces in these lines from "Song of Myself" the "origin" of all poetry, he carefully shows that this "origin" is neither ultimately unchanging nor his own self. He is not the great "origin" through whose eyes we see all of experience. Each self looks independendy and sees its own truth. Each strips away all that is dead or "spectral." Each self has a generous attitude, that is, each accepts every part of experience: "The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors" (LG, Ρ, 720). And, as the etymology of "generosity" suggests, the "Bard" will remain in difference without reaching irritably after identity and unity. In "Song of Myself," the persona declares his total and complete independence of all external sources which claim priority: These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. (LG, 32) The modern American, having revitalized old "systems," confronts all varieties of experience. Unlike all other "centers" which are free of the structure hung about them, Whitman as "center" of his own poetic structure partakes in the game. As a poet, he must maintain some minimal distance from an event, but it is not a detachment which ultimately separates him from the world. His responses are never cautious or meditative, but extravagant and impetuous: "I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing" (LG, 31). [164]

Walt Whitman Despite the novelty of these encounters, Whitman insists that they are not origin-al: These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me. If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This is the common air that bathes the globe.

(LG, 45)

There are at least two elements of this passage which deny that the self is center in Leaves of Grass. On the one hand, the self's thoughts and perceptions are similar to those of other men. The idea of the shared experiences of people is the basis of Whitman's theory of democracy. On the other hand, they are not a source, not a beginning, but rather are in common with "the thoughts of all men in all ages." They are part of an unending regression in history and of an infinite projection into the future. This "progress," of course, involves the shared response of all mankind. Identity or universality is dispersed historically by cultural repetition of different peoples in different ages. Democracy is a crucial part of Whitman's vision of an "ideal" world. The United States, as a democracy, is unique because of the generosity of its members toward one another and toward nature. In "The Base of All Metaphysics" Whitman's vision of love, of generosity, as a fundamental principle of unity is very explicit: A word I give to remain in your memories and minds, As base and finale too for all metaphysics. [165]

Walt Whitman . . . underneath Christ the divine I see, The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents. Of city for city and land for land. (LG, 121) Whitman can identify himself sympathetically with all people, including the suffering, because of this loving generosity. He is not repelled, by horror, into flight. He does not attempt to abstract what is into some aesthetic and manageable fiction such as a nostalgic love for "universal humanity." The self is identified with the nation from the opening when Whitman asserts that America is the greatest poem. The journeys of these two continue on a parallel course throughout the poem. In "Europe," the earliest written poem of Leaves, America is portrayed as the phoenix: Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves, Like lightening it le'pt forth half startled at itself, Its feet upon the ashes and rags, its hands tight to the throats of kings. (LG, 266) The nation is a democracy and springs origin-less from ruins in this poem. Just like the self, the nation is causally disconnected from a firm base. The poem is oriented toward an infinite future. Although the millenium, the forming of all peoples into one unit is a desirable goal, the exuberance and joy of the poem, ultimately, emerges from the unknown, the incredible, the not-yet-dreamed. Whitman uses the language of Western fe/oi-oriented structures to go beyond the idea that the pursuit of a knowable end is a totally adequate mode of life. Universal democracy and love, then, is no more a final center for the poem than the self. Furthermore, when in some of his later poems Whitman does consider the nature of the soil out of which America grows, it resembles the infinite regression behind the child-poet. In [166]

Walt Whitman "Song of the Exposition," Whitman strongly asserts the need to put the past in a proper perspective: To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead. These are also the lessons of our New World; While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World! (LG, 1%) Whitman recognizes h o w the accomplishments and vastness of the past dwarf the merely present m o m e n t . "Passage to India" treats the same theme m o r e explicitly: The Past—the dark unfathom'd retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! The past—the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but growth out of the past? (As a projectile form'd, impell'd, passing a certain line, still keeps on, So the present, utterly form'd, impell'd by the past.) (LG, 411-12) N o t only is the individual "impelled" by the past, but "present" culture is denied autonomy. It is only one instant, one flourish in the vastness of history. T h e past, however, is an infinitude of time, a "teeming gulf," and not any firm basis. " T h e sleepers and shadows" echo the ruins of " E u r o p e . " This passage not only denies the status of "absolute" to the present moment, but also to the traditionally autonomous, certain, and therefore comforting concept of "presence." Derrida, in fact, argues that the traditional matrix of centrality "is the determination of being as presence in all senses of this w o r d . " "Presence," of course, is not merely what w e perceive as present: "It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence." 3 1 Whitman denies the self, the nation, and the present world the role of constant. All of these phenomena share in structurality and are not free of the structurality itself. In other words, they cannot be centers. 3 2 [167]

Walt Whitman Not only, then, does the poetic treatment of democracy show why the self is not a center in the poem, but it deconstructs the idea of an ending for the nation and the poem. Since the United States and the self follow parallel tracks in the poem, we can find examples of the self acting exuberantly in the world without a well-defined sense of an ending. The journey is the major metaphor which Whitman uses throughout Leaves of Grass to dramatize the self's freedom from the restrictions of a future goal which controls the present. "Song of the Open Road" is one of the major poems which develops this journey motif: Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune; Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road. The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(LG, 149) The journey is naturally oriented toward the future, but this particular journey is destined for no final point. The only "object" determining this trip is the will of the self and not some telos toward which all else must be directed. Without this goal, the self is "free." H e can travel wherever he will, disregarding all old parts and all public roles: From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, and considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, [168]

Walt Whitman Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

(LG, 151) The journey begins by announcing freedom and by casting off all that might restrict or predetermine. This does not deny the shared or old since the self still loves the "public road," but it adds the unforeseen possibilities to the future of the self. The poem goes on as a celebration of complete freedom which follows the divestment of bonds, of center: Allons! the inducements shall be greater, We will sail pathless and wild seas, We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail. Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements, Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity, Allons! from all formules! From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.

(LG, 154-55) The seas and roads are previously untried and the journey not determined by the end. Therefore, the "pathless and wild" often present events which appear to be undesirable or threatening. Whitman confronts many of these throughout "Song of the Open Road." The major one is death; the second is change. Neither of these overcomes the exuberance permitted by total free play as it does, for example, in the early Yeats. Whitman's first response to death remains essentially unchanged. In "Song of Myself," he sees it and accepts it as part of the natural process and therefore of the journey: And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. . . . And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, . . . And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, [169]

Walt Whitman (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) (LG, 87) The cyclic idea of life and death in "Song of Myself" is fairly traditional in the poem, and the proud tone of these lines continues until section six of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." 3 3 Whitman confesses that his solution to the questions of evil and death trembles at times: It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? (LG, 162) In these lines, Whitman's whole achievement as poet is shaken. This poetic dark night is one of the risks he runs as poet journeying freely without a firm center. H e feels his imaginative and natural life threatened. Yet, in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," he finally overcomes this anxiety and continues onward. He accepts his recognition of the priority of diversity and nature; he is generous to all, and thus can go on as a poet: We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward, Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. (LG, 165) He recognizes even these crises as things in themselves, admits their necessity as parts of the whole of existence, and adds his experience of them to his own multiple "self." In "I Sit and Look O u t , " Whitman observes horror, disease, [1701

Walt Whitman and death, and yet he allows them: "All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,/See, hear, and am silent" (LG, 273). He no longer protests against these things, which seem frightening. He accepts them as part of his living. This acceptance does not, however, imply that Whitman is now proof against the doubts and anxieties he sees in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." In " O u t of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," for example, written by Whitman upon the death of his brother, loss and "unsatisfied love" disrupt this acceptance. Despite its menace to his art and his security, Whitman examines the implications of death and grief, and then continues on his journey without a sense of despair or recourse to a god: O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me. (LG, 252) The self experiences the loss of the loved other but does not try to escape or lessen the sadness, the pain, or feeling of lack. In fact, the self calls out for the complete revelation of the "destiny": O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,) O if I am to have so much, let me have more! A word then, (for I will conquer it,) The word final, superior to all, Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen; Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you seawaves? Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? [171]

Walt Whitman Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death, . . . (LG, 252) H e asks that the night, the darkness, the doubt, not hide any of itself f r o m him. H e dares to ask for the revelation of annihilation behind darkness. H e is not attempting to protect the self f r o m the void. H e prays to be "laved" by the w o r d itself: "Death, Death, Death, Death, Death" (LG, 252). T h e inevitability of death is accepted, but n o w not merely intellectually. Death is totally revealed. Its truth "flames o u t " to use W . C . Williams' image in "Tract"; it manifests itself fully. There is no retreat on Whitman's part, no despair. Despite the impressive victory of " O u t of the Cradle," however, Whitman's j o u r n e y remains potentially horrible and frustrating. In 1860, the year after " O u t of the Cradle," the balance and harmony of unconsciousness tempts W h i t m a n away f r o m confrontations with contingency: Me wherever life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies, O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do. (LG, 11) Needless to say, Whitman resists this temptation and continues on his endless way. In other words, Whitman does not rest in a poetic "victory" over the outside world and over time, both of which threaten him in this poem. There is no sense of his poetry or of his journey having come to an end, to a conclusion which sums up the entire enterprise and contains it. T h e r e is n o " c o n crete universal" in this poem. There is merely the continuing process of discovering and creating along the way of Whitman's daily encounters with things in the world. His poetic project is, quite simply, a repetition of itself and of that of other poets. [172]

Walt Whitman For another crucial aspect of this j o u r n e y - m e t a p h o r reveals the impossibility of ever reaching ultimate foundations, whether past or future. W h i t m a n , of course, puts off all hope of doing so in " S o n g of M y s e l f , " and at other times he shows that any "cent e r " is always beyond h u m a n reach. T h e best the self can d o in any quest for a center is " t o leap b e y o n d " (LG, 77) and try to bring it nearer, although never into immediacy, into "presence." In " S o n g of M y s e l f , " just as the past is an infinite gulf, the future is an unending procession. Whatever appears at a given m o m e n t as a god, a telos or arché, is always actually hiding something m o r e remote behind it: There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And as surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient, They are but parts, anything is but a part. See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. (LG, 82-83) T h e infinitude of space and time images the inaccessibility of finality. In fact, there is nothing which is not a part, nothing, that is, free of being part of the structure, nothing constant. T h e same idea appears in " A Song for Occupations": I do not affirm that what you see beyond is furile, I do not advise you to stop, I do not say leadings you thought great are not great. But I say that none lead to greater than these lead to. (LG, 218) Whitman does not stop the quest in despair; he advises pursuit, but he k n o w s that beyond each object is another, ad infinitum, [173]

Walt Whitman and that none is "greater," that is, more free and independent than any of the more immediate. The ultimate goal always evades; the final center does not exist. There is no further need to multiply examples of Whitman's deconstructions of the "center" and the language of presence. I must, though, show that Whitman's very Modern attitude m o d ulates with the more traditional attitude toward the universe, that is, one which sees a center. There are essentially two ways in which this happens. These can be discussed more briefly than I did the lack of a center because Whitman's critics have made this aspect of Leaves of Grass more readily available. Initially, it must be repeated that even from the beginning, god and transcendence are in Leaves. However, what I have already done shows, I think, h o w this theme, particularly in "Song of Myself," is more than counterbalanced by the unavailability of any center: I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, . . . And 1 say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass . . . . (LG, 86-87) In "Song of Myself," Whitman is conscious of divinity but unwilling to admit its absoluteness or even its superiority to self. [174]

Walt Whitman Furthermore, God's "divinity" is shared; it is de-centralized; it exists in human and natural objects. This is not pantheism, which sees god as coextensive with nature, but an attempt to banish god from human consideration as a goal. God exists only in the manifestations of things to people, to selves who are more wonderful than god. Yet a transcendent presence does emerge in the poem, and there are at least two ways in which this presence emerges from Whitman's center-less world. The first occurs occasionally throughout Whitman's journey and usually demonstrates the poet's desire for a god when confronted by horror or anxiety. God appears to alleviate horror and suffering more and more often in the poems following the Civil War and "Drum-Taps." In "Passage to India," this rather traditional reason for calling on a god blends with the second, which, in fact, emerges from Whitman's own free play. The last stanza of "Passages to India" demonstrates God in his role as guarantor of safety: Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. O O O O

my brave soul! farther farther sail! darling joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God? farther, farther, farther sail! (LG, 421)

Significantly, the wild seas of the earlier poems are safe now since God has returned; the journey is without radical risk since the deep seas are God's, that is, are founded on a firm basis. This changed attitude toward risk is typical of some of the late poems. Earlier in the same poem, God is shown as the force which constantly recreates the universe: Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, Athwart the shapeless vastness of space, [175]

Walt Whitman How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out of myself, I could not launch, to those, superior universes? (LG, 419) G o d , hovering over the shapeless universe, makes possible the journey into endless space. T h e second reason for the appearance of G o d so frequently in these last poems results f r o m the idea of free play itself. T h e self, once it achieves its own identity, that is, the unity of body and soul, goes on an endless j o u r n e y through the universe acquiring experience directly and vicariously by sympathetic identification. When the self confronts God in "Passage to India," it swells itself to the sublime vastness of the infinite to "cope" with God: Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, As Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me, And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space. (LG, 419) All experience accretes in the self to infinitude so that it becomes a h o m o l o g u e of God. In Georges Poulet's terms, the self brings the infinite exterior into the endless spaces of the interior and fills the self until it becomes the equal of G o d , until it achieves a totum simul.34 T h e self comes to hold all simultaneously just as G o d does. In this capability, the poet is " T h e true Son of G o d " (LG, 416). In these later developments in Whitman's poetry and vision, the free play and exuberance continue to exist, but n o w contradictorily with a feeling of certitude. God and self are equivalents; they are "centers" in the late verse as they are not earlier in Leaves of Grass. The earlier analogy of the poet and spider is denied: [176]

Walt Whitman A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my Soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold. Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul. (LG, 450). There is no m o r e uncertain extension into the void; the self is n o w firmly anchored and the bridge is more substantial than mere filament. There is n o risk once a god makes sailing safe and once the self discovers itself the equivalent of god containing all experience. M a n y critics, like Martz, complain of the decline of Whitman's late poetry. It not only becomes "abstract assertion," but it becomes in s o m e ways fraudulent. T h e existence of a center denies absolute free play as Derrida argues. The strained assertion of the late poems is a result of the loss of complete free play. Whitman maintains the tonal exuberance, but the real excitement of the early poetry is lost because the enticing "risk" of playing without a center is missing.

Ill Whitman's Leaves of Grass and his various prose Prefaces provide important poetic evidence of the inadequacy of the entire N e w Critical description of the tradition of American, and especially M o d e r n American poetry. Whitman writes poetry of the first [177]

Walt Whitman order which does not fit the spatialized preconceptions of ironic form. The openness of his poetry, its process, its refusal of strict "aesthetic" boundaries, makes it a threat to the New Critical sense of order and tradition through which the ironists cover-up the temporal nature of poetry and reading. Whitman "begins" an American tradition not by articulating in verse the "visionary" program Emerson imagines and, thus, making it available to succeeding poets. Rather, Whitman presents the American poets who come after him with the re-discovery of that temporality, of essential poetic "generosity" toward nature and the self which does not attempt to reify both these objects along preconceived and predetermined lines. In summary, I think it can be said that Whitman provides essentially t w o fundamental possibilities to American poetry: first, the possibility of re-newing the tradition by turning it against itself so that what it obscures can be re-discovered and revitalized as an issue of human interest; second, Leaves of Grass suggests a nominalistic aesthetic and theory of language which requires each poet to look for himself, to go back himself to the thing itself and not be satisfied with the words which have built up in tradition to "re-present" those things. N o major American poet since Whitman has not manifested both of these interests, but Wallace Stevens appears to be paradigmatic of those—including the Eliot of The Waste Land and The Four Quartets—who have extended the first possibility to an extreme. Stevens, as my next chapter will show, breaks open hardened past forms and frustrates the habitual responses associated with those forms to reveal the fundamentally fictional nature of all poetic statement. Stevens, like the Rousseau described by de Man in Blindness and Insight, is totally aware of the fact that language rests upon nothingness. "Fiction" merely offers itself as the illusion of a presence "covering" this abyss of emptiness underlying poetry and everything else. 35 Charles Olson, on the other hand, although interested in destroying the tradition, hopes to articulate the issues it coversup in a language drawn from another lexicon, from those men [178]

Walt Whitman and civilizations, like the Maya, that Western tradition has failed to examine authentically. For Olson, the key to poetic authenticity is the second possibility Whitman reveals. Olson's language can be an alternative to the reified New Critical tradition and to the bourgeois "pejoracracy" only because it is nominalistic. Words do not exist prior to things for Olson. He cannot accept "hearsay" or the "idle talk" of the crowd. Like the historian Herodotus, Olson feels he must go out beyond the veil of "discourse," the accepted linguistic equivalents of things, to the things themselves. The next two chapters will develop these ideas regarding each of these poets. Compared to Whitman, whose own values and attitudes are ambiguous, their achievements seem extreme and much more "Modern"—even, perhaps, Postmodern. Yet, Whitman is a pioneer. He re-discovers the way. He finds for American poetry the stance toward the past which is really directed to the future. He suggests the fruitful imaginative use of the American continent and its awesome physical newness. He insists upon the absolute and devoted attention to the world first and to the Word last which has helped to move American poetry away from the barren logocentric tradition of metaphysics to a more temporal poetics of discovery.

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Chapter Five

Fiction, Risk, and Deconstruction: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

"Fiction" is, of course, one of the most crucial elements of Wallace Stevens' poetry and poetics. Despite the critical attention which it receives, no one has commented upon its radical implications for Stevens and for Modern poetry in general. In Opus Posthumous, Stevens emphasizes his vision of the world and of all interpersonal and intrapersonal relations as fiction: "The transition from make believe for one's self to make believe for others is the beginning, or the end, of poetry in the individual." 1 N o t only is the self and the other defined as fiction, but "empirical reality" is seen to be finally devoid of transcendent certitude; in the last measure, we are left with nothing but "fiction": " T h e final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else" (OP, 163). Although these "Adagia" are largely undatable and may stem from Stevens' late period, this idea of "fiction" exists throughout his poetry from Harmonium. His titles clearly show that he thought of even his early poetry as "fiction": "Metaphors of a Magnifico," "Earthy Anecdote," " T h e Apostrophe to Vincetine," "Fabliau of Florida" (my italics). While all readers admit at least implicitly that literature is in some way "fiction," there is little if any agreement on what this [181]

Wallace Stevens means and implies. T h e argument usually divides along t w o lines. O n the one hand, the worshippers of the constitutive imagination would have it that "reality" is the result of perception transformed by self into a coherent order which might take many forms. In its severest forms, this results in Symboliste works which are so personal and impenetrable that they appear the products of virtually solipsistic minds. O n the other hand, the "realists" discount the independence of the imagination f r o m socalled empirical reality which is "out-there." In its purest forms, this leads to photographic realism which is committed to the primacy of matter over mind. A n d , of course, the Symbolistes, like the M o d e r n ironists epitomized by Brooks, are rebelling against realism and naturalism for complex reasons. Because of his o w n propensity to use the language of this tradition, Stevens' critics discuss his concept of "fiction" in exacdy these terms. Scholars ignore the truly radical notion at the "center" of his "fiction," keep him in the mainstream of the Romantic and dualistic metaphysical tradition, and obscure his most salient M o d e r n characteristics. Roy Harvey' Pearce's fine essays on Stevens are paradigms of this problem. 2 Although Pear ce defines himself in opposition to the N e w Critics, his language of continuity keeps him in essentially the same tradition. Pearce begins from the assumption that Stevens continues in the tradition of Romantic and American dualism and proceeds to argue that he brings it to culmination by achieving a kind of Kantian synthesis which posits reality in a "third term": the conjunction of self and outside world in an active perception of empirical reality: Thus the world in which Stevens' history unfolds is one characterized above all by an extreme vision . . . of that radical opposition which has obsessed so many major American poets. It is the opposition between the poetic and antipoetic—between the self (or in Stevens' more usual terms, the imagination, or the mind) and a reality which is not part of that self but must be brought into its purview, composed, and so (as it were) recreated.3

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Wallace Stevens The developmental metaphor of nineteenth century organicism and positivism dominates Pearce's discussion of Stevens. H e sees Stevens' career as a movement f r o m a clear beginning to a definite end which achieves synthesis and thereby eliminates the tensions which the unresolved conflict arouses. Pearce concludes that in Stevens' final poetry "the Imagination may be defined as at once the use which the Reason makes of the material world and the use which the material world makes of the Reason." 4 Pearce is certainly not alone in maintaining this position. Bernard Heringman, in "Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry," argues that for Stevens, "the final development of the fictive process" is a synthesis, an intersection of reality and imagination. Poetry for Stevens is a "means of escape f r o m reality, a means of ordering the chaos of reality, a means of finding a good in reality." This constitutes, according to Heringman, "a shift toward the center, toward the balancing point between the t w o members of the dichotomy." 5 These t w o essays are typical of two streams of Modern criticism. The Romantic desire both for synthesis by dialectic and for the developmental metaphor underlie the perspective which causes these critics to look for a "final" position in Stevens. The N e w Critical influence allows them to see this "final" stage as a telos which completes the activity of the poet and, ironically (that is, by means of a pervasively ironic stance), reduces tension and existential anxiety as well in a "balancing point" of stasis. H o w ever, as I have pointed out in chapter one, Paul de Man's readings of Nietzsche's destruction of the metaphysical tradition lets the myth of development, progress, and telos emerge in its Being as fictional discourse. Nietzsche shows that discursive structures "centered" around metaphors of evolution and generation contain no priority within themselves. The concepts of beginning and end function, as Derrida argues, 6 as "centers" which are variations of the myth of presence. Joseph Riddel's critique of Helen Vendler's On Extended Wings shows the effects of this "blindness" in reading Stevens which results from the dialectical, N e w Critical bias, that is, [183]

Wallace Stevens f r o m the pervasively ironic stance of formalist criticism of M o d ern texts: "Mrs. Vendler insists that Stevens' long poems, like his long career as a poet, reveal a dialectical dissolve that gathers beginning into end in a select harvest of poems not only seeking but achieving purity." Mrs. Vendler wants Stevens' poetry to have not only a "teleological refinement," but also, echoing both Brooks and I.A. Richards, "internal resolutions" so that " ' p o etry can save us.' " 7 In his last stage, according to Vendler, Stevens "has gone beyond crying out to Jerusalem, beyond crying out even to a living name or place or thing, beyond all directed cries at all. Utterance is utterance, and the exertion to make it something more has disappeared." 8 Vendler's view of Stevens' poems as circles gathering "beginning into end" and apotheosizing themselves as Absolute Images of verbal purity is the result of a circular argument which stems from the sedimented, reified, covered-over habits of reading Modern texts f r o m a N e w Critical point of view. As I have suggested in chapter one, Heidegger demonstrates that "interpretation" is a structure of "understanding" and, therefore, that it is "projective," that is, fore-sightful and forehaving. Thus, all interpretation, whether it be the primordial articulation of what is ready-at-hand and disclosed to understanding in Being-in-the-World, or the derived mode of direct assertion, is necessarily "circular." However, since the " o n t o logical circle" of interpretation is not the vicious circle of logic and first principles, Vendler, like the N e w Critics, is mistaken in attempting to avoid the circle. Rather, the problem becomes one of getting into the circle in the right way (BT, 27-28; 193-95; 362-64). For Heidegger the authentic way into the circle must be phenomenological, i.e., not coercive and teleological, but rather a "letting" the entity disclose itself from itself as a phenomenon. T h e similarity between such phenomenological interpretation and "phenomenological destruction" (BT, 63) demands that historiological interpretation, such as literary criticism, be seen by critics as destructive. As I argued in chapter two, insofar as a poem is discourse and therefore is interpretation, a projection of Being-in-the-World, it too must be recognized as destructive. [184]

Wallace Stevens Ironie criticism, which in its desire f o r infinitude and godlike h o v e r i n g tries to d e n y w h a t Kierkegaard calls "actuality" and H e i degger " e x i s t e n c e , " naturally cannot help b u t be blind to the interpretive, i.e., destructive, aspects of poetic discourse and structure. Its traditional metaphysical dualistic m y t h w h i c h is often the g r o u n d of m o r e particular "fictions" of presence—self, transcendence, intuition, finality, center—is itself the frequent object of the destructive discourse, not only of W h i t m a n , b u t of that archetypal " i r o n i s t , " Wallace Stevens, as well. Riddel bases his criticism of Vendler on certain generalities a b o u t Heidegger's destruction of onto-theological metaphysics and on Derrida's interpretation o f Heidegger and others in " S t r u c t u r e , Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the H u m a n Sciences." A l t h o u g h Riddel is restricted by the f o r m a t of a r e v i e w article, he is able, nonetheless, to turn traditional discourse back u p o n Vendler j u s t as Stevens turns it back u p o n itself. Riddel attacks Vendler's R o m a n t i c notions of arche and telos and concludes in opposition to Vendler that " t h e r e is n o m o r e a c o n s u m m a t e d arrival in later Stevens than there was a m e a n i n g f u l d e p a r t u r e in the e a r l i e r . " 9 Stevens, Riddel argues, uses poetry to scrutinize its o w n origins until he finds that at the " c e n t e r " of poetry and all reality there is n o "presence": For in both his poetry and his prose, Stevens is engaged in an "act" of decreation, one dimension of which is the turning of language, and in certain instances a familiar or even banal concept back upon itself, by way of pursuing some origin at the heart of utterance—or to put it in terms of one of his poems, to seek the unspoken word of the "central poem" that is at once proved and disproved (and thus displaced) by "lesser poems." In short Stevens seems to sense a presence at the origin, a discoverable presence, but every penetration to that presence only reveals that the place is a fiction, an interpretation, and thus not an ultimate or supreme or central poem but only another lesser poem. 1 0 In language, w h i c h is perhaps m o r e immediate in t h e c o n text of Heidegger, Riddel's claims may b e interpreted by saying that Stevens is aware that all discourse is interpretation, that is, [185]

Wallace Stevens fiction, and that this fundamental truth is obscured by the reification of certain concepts into a pattern of habits, a "natural standp o i n t . " Like Heidegger, Stevens senses the necessity for all interpretation which hopes to redeem the truth of fiction and nonhabitual, n o n m y t h i c ways of confronting " N o t Ideas about the T h i n g But the Thing Itself," to be violent, destructive, discoverings of Being and of the original " t r u t h " (in Heidegger's sense of aletheia, of course) which is lost in the n o w solidified linguistic assertions about what in the past originally dis-closed itself. Riddel's seems a very reasonable description of Stevens' poems, especially of those which employ the primary metaphors of quest, journey, and meditation. Although the poems seem, as Pearce and Vendler testify, to progress to a final point of formal integration and philosophical h a r m o n y , they actually bring into question the centrality of such concepts as these as well as such formal achievements. T h e problem with Riddel's essay, h o w ever, is his literal usage of the metaphor of discovery. H e would have it that Stevens really searches for a "center" in his poetry and ultimately finds that nothing is there: It is a search, of course, that must repeatedly bring into question all other centers, and thus all myths, and ultimately bring into question the idea of center itself, until in the centerless center of imaginative activity, of the poem speaking itself, we understand the significance of the poetry of "play," the freedom of its activity within the space of language. 11 In maintaining this position, h o w e v e r , Riddel is inconsistent. H a d he carried to completion the insight that this poetry scrutinizes itself by looking for its origins, he would recognize that the very metaphor of search, which he employs to describe Stevens' works, is also being turned back u p o n itself. It is by virtue of the awareness that there is no center that Stevens is able to rethink specific centered myths and metaphors and show them to be fiction in a radical sense in the early poetry. The rethinking of the quest-search metaphor and its decentering is perhaps clearest in " T h e Comedian as the Letter C " which I shall discuss later. [186]

Wallace Stevens It can be said now, however, that Stevens does not learn by a failed quest for a center that center and therefore quest are meaningless. Rather, he actively employs the telos-oriented quest metaphor against itself not merely to show that there is no center but to test in fiction various poetic and personal myths and metaphors in a world with no firm point o f reference. Herein lies the radical risk o f Stevens' poetry. Although he knows from the beginning that there is nothing at the "center" and consequently that all is "fiction," he nonetheless writes poems, creates "fictions." T o do so, he avails himself o f all that he has as a person and as a poet. He marshals one metaphor, belief, and interpretation after another in tests o f value o f received and acquired " t r u t h s . " He does this in order to destroy their hardened existence, to discard what is now useless and obscuring, and to release what had long ago disclosed itself and become the origin o f the particular myth or metaphor. H e de-centers and destroys the various structures which had acclimated man in the world and which had covered over his previous existentiality and finitude as well as the actual metaphoricity o f his linguistic structures. Poetically, Stevens goes beyond experiencing the anxiety and dread which results from confronting the world stripped o f what makes it human. He risks the linguistic structures and tropes which had anthropomorphized and reified disclosure. H e frees poetry's possibilities by breaking away from the traditional " p o e t r y " at-home in the inherited language and structures o f a metaphysical "tradition." Harold Bloom argues that in the American poetic dialectic " F r e e d o m , " which for Emerson is " N e w n e s s , " "Influx," and "Wildness," is the nature o f the " P o e t " himself. Yet " F a t e , " which might be called " D e s t i n y " or "necessity," limits Freedom, so that the poet must settle for second best, the "surprise" afforded by the "pathos o f p o w e r " (H^S, 3, 6). Here is Bloom on the interplay o f Freedom, Fate, and Power as he prepares his meditation on Stevens: Fate is a reseeing series o f tropes, but Power is a reaiming. Fate is taboo, but Power is transcendence. In between, in the realm

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Wallace Stevens of Freedom or meaning, revision is neither a reseeing nor a reaiming but only a re-estimating, and such freedom to esteem again is neither taboo nor transcendence but transgression, or the threshold-state proper. (WS, 17)

Within his general theory of poetry and criticism and given his special sense of Emersonianism, that is, of American repression, we are not surprised when we find Bloom announcing that Stevens' poetry can be most profitably read as a series of tropes and crossings resting on the "anxiety of influence." Stevens is taken up into the Bloomian apparatus and the significance of his poetry is restricted to the realm of Gnostic subjectivity: "Freedom or the second chance, the saving blend of Vocation and Temperament, has been discovered in the dance of substitutions, not in the substitutions themselves" (WS, 22). As I have already suggested, this "free play" of substitution upon a given ground which limits that free play is an aspiration to godhead, as one can see by reading Cleanth Brooks through the achievement of Heidegger and Kierkegaard. It is an aestheticization of poetry which, of course, denies to poets and poetry the cognitive power of the critical will. But, as the case of Riddel's fine essay makes clear, and as de Man generally argues, the poet precedes the critic in his belated démystification or revisionism. This is certainly true in the case of the relation between Bloom and Stevens. Although I will not attempt to specify all of the ways Stevens' poetry preempts Bloom, I will suggest both that Stevens begins with a more complex sense of the issues at stake in reducing poetry to the free play of substitutions resting on a sure ground—Stevens, unlike Bloom, seriously questions his own "first idea"—and that Stevens' poetry is often a destruction of the sublime as Bloom describes it. It is not accidental that Bloom chooses to describe Stevens' "sublime" in metaphors of "hovering" which are central to New Critical ironic and aesthetic plays for power: "There is a Sublime chill in Of Mere Being, but there is also an increasing or heightening that is of the nature of the American Sublime" (WS, 374). [188]

Wallace Stevens Stevens continually deconstructs privileged metaphors of presence related to these figures of height and sublimity. He turns toward these traditional figures to demystify them so that he can use them to dis-close "truth," rather than either being used by them or misusing them merely in the service of the subjective powers of an aggressive defense. Stevens' problem is analogous to Kierkegaard's. H o w , when language has been usurped by the ironists and positivists, by the reifers and coercers, can an artist hope to use language without being himself mastered by that language and the interpretations embedded within it? H o w to repeat and not simply replicate? His answer, like Kierkegaard's, is to use mastered irony as a weapon in destruction. Proceeding from the disclosure of fiction—which my analysis of "The Snow M a n " will develop more fully— Stevens is free of the coercive genealogical myth of progress and the aesthetic myth of ironic hovering. Consequently, his "tests" of various tropes and metaphors against the absence of center to reveal what is still positive and redeemable within the sedimented tradition are, as Kierkegaard says of Goethe, ways of "making his existence as a poet congrue with his actuality. . . . The truth is that the particular poetic production is simply a m o m e n t " (CI, 337). Thus, the result of phenomenological destruction and interpretation is a return to actuality, to an acknowledgment of Being-in-the World as a fundamental temporal constituent structure of Dasein. Since the poet is free to blast away the "aesthetic" interpretations in language by "re-thinking" the "centers" and revealing their Being as fiction, he performs and discloses movements which are possible only in the medium of life and not in art. H e does not dualistically cordon off World from Word in a reversal of the ironists' position; rather, he dis-covers the inevitable being of language as human act, what Heidegger calls both logos (legein) and Rede, as occurring in-the-World and existing as the agency to let phenomena appear as such in themselves and from themselves (cf. BT, 55-58). Both poetic and critical activity have such discourse as their ontological ground. "The Snow M a n " is the earliest certain demonstration of [189]

Wallace Stevens Stevens' knowledge of the nothingness at the heart of fiction. T h e poem reveals t w o attitudes toward nothingness; it rejects one and accepts the other as primordial and original: One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice. The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 12 T h e poem works in essentially t w o movements. T h e first requires the reduction of the perceiving self to the point where he can see Nature without the intruding veil of a symbol or a correspondence which metaphorically transforms the other into an appendage of the self. T h e second movement, culminating in the last stanza, describes the new way in which the self beholds the other after becoming "nothing himself." H e sees "Nothing that is not there . . ."; he can no longer impose human emotion, "any misery," on "the sound of the w i n d . " Generally speaking, the poem has destroyed the pathetic fallacy. In fact, the nature of perception itself is changed. T h e pointed repetition of "behold" in lines five and fourteen emphasizes the change. In the state prior to the reduction traced in this poem, "the listener" could only respond to the nothingness which exists by making it meaningful, by adding to it a sense of depth which makes it less "other." H e refuses to let the " o t h e r " stand as it re[190]

Wallace Stevens ally is, as a mystery he cannot understand. H e demonstrates no "Negative Capability," but, instead, transforms the "other" into something possessing " h u m a n " qualities, that is, readily interpretable along the lines of habitual, anthropocentric patterns of expectation which reflect the "listener's" own image back upon his senses. As a result, man as "the listener"—of course, an extremely ironic name since he no more listens to the wind as such than any systematizer allows an incongruent detail to disrupt the order of his grand scheme—cannot consciously "see" "the nothing that is" in which all of "what-is" exists. Whitman's horizonal vista is closed to the listener. T h e first attitude to the external world obscures " t r u t h " and maintains a comforting delusion. After reduction, the listener "beholds" m o r e clearly that his pathetic identification with a seemingly concrete other is a fiction at the root of which lies " n o t h i n g . " As well, he learns of a more profound relation between himself and the other. H e is "nothing himself," that is, he is ontologically identical with the other insofar as they are both part of "what-is" existing in and by virtue of " n o t h i n g . " Just as Sartre's Roquentin k n o w s that the nausea is at the base of his o w n being as well as that of the chestnut tree in the public garden, the listener—finally properly named—recognizes the universality of the "nothing that is." H e senses the falsity of the dualistic separation of res cogitans and res extensa and sees the primordiality of Being-in-the-World, alongside the World, as a structure of his o w n Being. This poem reveals the untruth, the illusion, the fiction of all attitudes toward reality which ignore the nothingness at their base, their center. It suggests, for example, that the idea of the self, of the individual, is a fiction, a metaphor; reduction shows the listener to be "nothing himself." When fictions are demystified and the questor pierces to the center, he finds nothing. Stevens k n o w s this and he risks the soothing concepts of the transforming sympathetic imagination and of the unique self to demonstrate it. H e reveals that even these highly valued, yet unexamined, ideas or myths conceal the nothing which lies at the [191]

Wallace Stevens heart of all utterance. In fact, this poem, as an ars poetica, shows h o w literally poetry, linguistic discourse of the highest order, is a metaphysical fiction based on nothing. It might be called, f r o m a traditional perspective, an "anti-poem" since it militates against the naming of the center. Unlike all poems which might be written by anyone analogous to the listener before his reduction, this one refuses analogy, metaphor, and correspondence to define what the poem "really" or "finally" reveals. That is to say, the poem is not even an allegory of the failure to name the center. " T h e Snow M a n " shows that all poems have nothingness at their center and that other poems and poets, unconscious of this, while delusively trying to name the center and thus to obscure the nothing of what is, always disclose the omnipresence of mere metaphor in poetry. This "anti-poem" is thus the archetypal poem—if such a paradox may be invoked here. It presents itself as an already deconstructed fiction. It not only acknowledges that nothingness as "center" is the "source" of all poetry, but that it is also the "origin" of all allegorical interpretation as well. This means not only that all such interpretation is radically u n grounded and vulnerable, but that it has actively tried to forget its own "source" in the Ab-grund of nothing. As I have already suggested in my discussion of Whitman, Derrida illustrates perfectly for m y purposes here h o w the illusion of a centered structure provides a reassuring certitude by offering, as it were, a still point which identifies all the play of differences in the turning world of text and Being. The reader w h o interprets not allegorically but destructively exchanges a Grund for an Ab-grund. H e interests himself in the metaphoricity of existence, refuses to hide behind aesthetic disinterest and systematization and, in fact, counterposes all he inherits, all he has— myth, truth, and value—against the abyss of metaphor, of absence which is the being of the poem. This risk results f r o m being implicated in the game and it defines Stevens' difference f r o m the unmastered ironists. H e exposes conventional and personal myths and beliefs to a poetic procedure radically " r o o t e d " in nothing. [192]

Wallace Stevens The element of risk is critically underestimated in Stevens because his tone is not rhetorically sublime nor hysterical over loss. Yeats knows that "center cannot hold" and he shouts to us that "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed" and that "the ceremony of innocence is drowned" as he evokes the horrific, yet potentially pleasing sights and sounds of apocalypse. Stevens' interpretations of human fictions are metaphorical meditations upon their potential value for humanity as a way of becoming aware of the radical precariousness of absence which lies concealed behind each structure. Although his tone is quieter than that of Yeats and others, and consequendy the degree of his risk is unrecognized, as "The Snow Man" shows, Stevens is willing to decenter even the most assuring myths of self, of the ability of poetry to reach some final position which will give it a unique value, and of the comforting aesthetic possibility of reading a poem simply as a narrative allegory of its own failed, fictional nature. As Derrida points out, the absence of the center allows a greater amount of free play. N o idea or metaphor is any longer an unquestioned value around which all else revolves. For Stevens this means that no element of the tradition, no relation to reality, no metaphysical or ironic strategy, can be left unexamined and be accepted in an unqualified way. In effect, then, Stevens' poetry is a process of meditative thinking like that of Heidegger in Gelassenheit, which re-interprets previous interpretations of Being following the "projection" of nothing which "The Snow M a n " makes so explicit as the "fore-having" of Stevens' understanding. It is also a proleptic meditation; it anticipates and prevents all attempts to allegorize it by always asserting its own selfevident, metaphorically discontinuous status. Stevens' poetry concentrates thematically on the way in which these interpretations emerge from a human's, that is, Dasein's, Being-in-the-World. His poems engage the traditional metaphysical language of the dualistic imagination-reality conflict to destroy it; such destruction, of course, is not merely a privative function, but an attempt to regain whatever is positive within the tradition. He allows what the tradition covers up to [193]

Wallace Stevens emerge primordially. This is the pervasive concern of his art. It assumes many variations as Stevens deals with one major motif after another. For example, his earliest book of poetry adopts the language and attitude of the English decadents and some of the French symbolists, and his style shows a corresponding lushness and hypersexuality. Stevens turns his poetry against this early achievement in such explicit poems as "Farewell to Florida." This poem does not stand in a merely ironic and timeless relation to what precedes; it does not embody suspended choices the poet refuses to make. As a change, a seized-upon possibility in which the "act of the m i n d , " the poem, in the moment corresponds to the life of the poet, it marks a movement away f r o m his "aesthetic" stage. Although "A Farewell to Florida" is a rather obvious statement of his decision to abandon the fictions of Harmonium by abandoning the lush imagery and rhythms of death and beauty, it points to the more sophisticated methods of re-interpretation like " T h e Comedian as the Letter C . " In his more ambitious long poems, there is a process of rethinking a traditional situation and language so that the potential of the given idea may be heard and made newly manifest. Formally, these long poems employ traditional structural devices in which the poet might think. The poem is not " m a d e " to work itself out according to an idea conceived in advance. Rather, in the process of developing the poem, the poet rarely brings the f o r m to the kind of fruition which its poetic lineage would lead a reader—even an ironical one—to expect. T h e poems refuse all sense of finality or simple reversal. Instead, they remain open to whatever may appear as the poem itself subverts habitual structures and expectations. " T h e Comedian as the Letter C " is the best early example of Stevens' deconstructive poetry. T h e poem is modelled on teleological structures centered upon metaphors of genetics and quest, more specifically, on the Wordsworthian model of the g r o w t h of the poet's mind. Like Marcel Proust, the young Wordsworth, having lived through the experiences of The Prelude, having learned that "spiritual Love acts not nor can exist/ Without Imagina[194]

Wallace Stevens tion," 13 writes The Prelude with the end in mind as a goal for the poem, a telos k n o w n from the beginning. Just as the experience and knowledge gained by the end of the poem prepares Wordsworth to write the poem which we read, so the sudden illumination the ending affords to the reader of the rest of the poem and of its organization and guiding impulse betrays that the poem has not been allowed to emerge from the process of creation, from itself, but has been throughout written from the end to correspond with a final concept arrived at beforehand in Book XIV. In his masterful Natural Supematuralism, M. H. Abrams, in a chapter knowingly entided, "The Idea of'The Prelude,' " reaches the same conclusion: In the course of The Prelude Wordsworth repeatedly drops the clue that his work has been designed to round back to its point of departure. . . . The Prelude, then, is an involuted poem which is about its own genesis—a prelude to itself. Its structural end is its own beginning; and its temporal beginning, as I have pointed out, is Wordsworth's entrance upon the stage of his life at which it ends. The conclusion goes on to specify the circular shape of the whole.14 Other versions of such teleological structures abound both in the Romantic Tradition and in the Modern movement. In Romantic poetry a similar impulse is to be found in the quest figures of the Solitary (The Excursion, Bk. II) 15 and of Shelley's Alastor. In both poems, the questors urge themselves on toward an Absolute; they are never satisfied with nor do they meaningfully confront what is ready-at-hand. They try instead to pierce the penetralium and cannot rest, as Keats first pointed out about Coleridge, in Negative Capability. They need a visionary goal, an end which will be a final truth or idea toward which they can read and write comfortably, secure in the knowledge that they have found or will find the still-point outside the game. O f course, both Wordsworth and Shelley frustrate the quests of their personae and return them harshly, in death, to the World of the here and now, [195]

Wallace Stevens to a confrontation with the unintelligible. Yet, in Alastor, there is a specific tone of regret that it is poetically necessary to show that the desired vision is not in the World and that one w h o devotes himself wholly to it must inevitably fail in the embrace of death. In both poems, the questors' goal is an Absolute, Infinite Image which, especially in the case of Alastor, is "aesthetic" or "ironic" in Kierkegaard's sense of the terms. In The Excursion, the Solitary's momentary vision of a "mighty city" (1. 835) is so painfully pleasurable that he longs to die. O f course, his deathwish is immediately and subtly undercut by the actual death of the "SufFerer," (11. 890-95) and the efficacy of the Solitary's Imaged Ideal is reduced. At the same time, however, as the vision is qualified by death, it becomes more desirable. It offers a flawless, Absolute, Infinite " W o r l d " of stasis and beauty where there is n o death because there is no life. In other words, as Image, the vision is a telos for the persona, which the poem shows is "possible" only in art and not in life, in a finite World. In Alastor, of course, the young questor becomes dissatisfied with the variety and beauty of the World and of human thought, and, as a result, as Shelley says in the "Preface" to the poem, " H e images to himself the Being w h o m he loves." The picture of this Being is composed f r o m all the wisdom, poetry, and philosophy the young man can gather and " T h e Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image. " Unable to find in the World or to project upon it the equivalent of the Absolute aesthetic Image he has created, Alastor dies: " H e seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely g r a v e . " 1 6 We can draw f r o m Abrams' "interpretation" of this basic quest-journey structure of various Romantic texts—poetic and philosophical—some of the fundamental issues, values, and facts which are at stake in the imaginative exercise of this discursive structure. T h e metaphorical model of this f o r m is, of course, "biological genesis, growth, and development" which the Romantics conceive "as a circuitous journey back h o m e " (NS, 191). This metaphor becomes a clearly defined plot: "the painful edu[196]

Wallace Stevens cation through ever expanding knowledge of the conscious subject as it strives . . . to win its way back to a higher mode of the original unity with itself from which, by its primal act of consciousness, it has inescapably divided itself o f f " ( N S , 190-91. My italics.) In purely literary terms, this movement "tends to be imagined in the story form of a Bildungsreise whose end is its own beginning" (NS, 191). The teleological organization of this structure is designed to move both the questor and the reader of the text away from the disintegrated, vacuous uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit, "not-at-home-ness") of this fallen world of metaphorical difference, back to a mythic state of unity which is concealed by "consciousness." The cogito, in the classical Cartesian heritage of German Idealism, separates us from the extended world and its correspondences; this dissociation of the sensibility divides us from our home, our true center and goal to which we must return. We must come again into the "presence" of this "higher integration" (NS, 193), and transcend our "fallen state." Although as Abrams points out, and as the Solitary and Alastor make clear, many writers qualify this "fortunate fall." When they realize that "the goal is an infinite one which lies forever beyond the reach of man, whose possibilities are limited by the conditions of a finite world," they are often willing to substitute "approximation for attainment, making success in life depend on man's sustaining his infinite aspiration throughout the course of his finite existence" (NS, 194-95). In other words, when confronted by the essential failure of a circular, teleological strategy to return them to the original presence of the center, they adjust their desires in the face of what many Freudian critics of Romanticism call the "reality principle." Rather than radically examine the assumptions behind their projection of a return, they compromise to accommodate their vision. Thus, in the moment of their greatest "insight," that is, of the necessary failure of the quest form, they are, as de Man would put it, necessarily "blind" to it. Their works show but they cannot see that their endoriented structure reveals the absence of a center and that it performs its own destruction, that is, it manifests itself as a "fic[197]

Wallace Stevens tion," as an "interpretation" determined beforehand by the "fore-sight" that there "is" a "center" out of the game. By destroying the Romantics' o w n and their descendents' view of the structure, de-struction, that is, phenomenologically interpretive art, can reveal what habit has covered over, what the quest motif proves despite its users' desires—that you cannot go h o m e again, because there is n o h o m e to go to. In Wallace Stevens' " T h e Comedian as the Letter C , " Crispin strives for such a telos, such a return. T h e poem possesses the same basic structure of quest and g r o w t h as the Romantic poems I have mentioned. However, neither the poem nor Crispin arrives at a vision or an end to his " g r o w t h . " Furthermore, unlike W o r d s w o r t h and Shelley, Stevens is not satisfied merely to describe a frustrated quest and to suggest the "opposition" between the desired image and the real world. Stevens actually rethinks the trope and destroys the hardened pattern of the questfigure itself while at the same time anticipating Pearce's, Vendler's, and even Riddel's reading of his o w n poetry. T h e opening of the p o e m establishes Crispin's connection with the Romantic tradition of the questor: Crispin at sea Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. An eye most apt in gelatines and jupes, Berries of villages, a barber's eye, An eye of land, of simple salad-beds, Of honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung On porpoises, instead of apricots, And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts Dibbled in waves that were mustachios, Inscrutable hair in an inscrutable world. (P, 58)

This Crispin is "the Socrates I O f snails, musician of pears, principium/ And lex." H e is an incongruous hero; his vision is limited, based on mundane objects of village life. H e pretends to be a " l e x " u n t o nature, whereas he is nothing but a "nincompated pedagogue" w h o n o w leaves his h o m e on the land to try to be a [198]

Wallace Stevens "Preceptor to the sea." Once "at sea" he creates doubt, that is, the comforting elements of his everyday life are left behind as he enters on a quest for a knowledge and a state of art which is beyond that available to him at home. Stevens' decreation begins, however, in the very same lines as the introduction of the quest motif. In this case, the reinterpretation is accomplished largely by the language itself. Crispin's land perceptions are reduced in the richly sensual language which echoes the effete decadence of Stevens' early "Florida" style. In "Sunday Morning," for example, there are numerous instances of Stevens' attraction to a lush language which represents the peak of sensual perfection preceding decline and corruption: Death is the mother of beauty, . . . She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. (P. 7) Crispin's eye is at home with apricots and not plums, but clearly Stevens establishes enough of a verbal connection between Crispin and his own decadent fictions that examination of Crispin should be seen to involve Stevens' evaluation of his own early style and poetic preoccupations. At the same time, Stevens undercuts the degree of seriousness which should attend to Crispin's quest. In the Romantic tradition, the poetic search for vision is the most crucial of all concerns and demands a very serious response. For Stevens, beginning with the knowledge that ultimately the Romantic quest is self-deluding, there is a corresponding reduction in the amount of seriousness ascribed to Crispin's search. Another way of saying this would be that Stevens, free of the compulsion to find a center, may completely indulge the poetic instinct to [199]

Wallace Stevens play. H e adopts a tone of excess, of tongue-in-cheek, which parodies not only his o w n sensual fiction in Harmonium, but that of the Romantic quest. In the last lines of the paragraph quoted above, Crispin's vision shifts to porpoises and away f r o m apricots. Clearly this exotic fish replaces the exotic fruit and represents the n e w vision which Crispin as Romantic voyager needs to accommodate. In these same lines, however, these porpoises are transformed into " s n o u t s " which create figures in waves by "dibbling" and these waves are metamorphosed into " m u s tachios" which come to represent the "inscrutable hair" of an "inscrutable w o r l d . " T h e Romantics and, of course, the Symbolistes are questing for correspondences, for sets of meaning, some of which are transcendent, which exist behind or below the surface veil of things. In these lines, this veil which the symbol-making imagination is always trying to pierce is comically reduced by the excessive particularity of the image into the "inscrutable hair," the foam of an ocean wave. Crispin's journey begins in a most serious and, for many poets, still viable tradition. Stevens, h o w ever, reduces the viability of the quest by the h u m o r of the imagery, which de-creates or masters the Romantic metaphor of the veil and of the idea of correspondences. As a result of this sort of de-construction, the following thematic statement which undercuts Crispin as heroic, poetic questor not only comes as no surprise but resonates in ways beyond the merely thematic: What word split up in dickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? Crispin was washed away by magnitude. (P, 58-59) By this point, the expectation that Crispin will come to a successful conclusion of unquestionable value, in the way of his ancestors, is in serious doubt. Stevens not only is thematically discussing Crispin and his identification with Stevens' o w n [200]

Wallace Stevens preoccupations in Harmonium, but, as Riddel would say, is using the form and language to think about, to re-interpret, the possibilities of Crispin and the quest motif as a fiction. Crispin is "unnamed." There is no longer any clear " w o r d " to define him. N o t only has he been poetically reduced to "nothing himself" but the fictions which surround him, those that would establish the nature of the Crispin-questor figure, have been decreated and their efficacy put in doubt. Stevens can no longer write about Crispin using the poetic quest metaphor in any traditional way. He must create the poem by destroying the myth with which the poem begins. He disrupts the modern reader's expectation that the myth would structure the poem by harmonizing all the poem's metaphors in a traditional resolution. Stevens' reduction of Crispin's self parallels that of the listener in " T h e Snow Man": The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance on pale parasols, Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets. . . . Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. The imagination, here, could not evade, In poems of plums, the strict austerity Of one vast, subjugating, final tone. (P, 59-60) In this passage, the direct echoes of "The Snow M a n " and of "Sunday Morning" disclose Stevens' poetry of re-interpretation. Crispin is reduced, like the listener, to "nothing himself." The key word of "The Snow M a n , " "behold," is repeated here in its past tense. The decadent plums of "Sunday Morning" are banished by a vision of austerity which is analogous to the vision of the "nothing that is" at the end of " T h e Snow M a n . " The quest [201]

Wallace Stevens figure and the re-interpretation of the sensual metaphors of Florida bring the reader to see that the reduction of all semantic fictions reveals the nothingness at the heart of verbal structure and literary competence. 17 This is not to argue, however, that this is in any way the discovery of a "final" truth or value for Crispin. The point of finding a lack of center is that this is an uncomfortable discovery which leaves the "poet" unsatisfied and still questioning: "What was this gaudy, gusty panoply?/ Out of what swift destruction did it spring?" (Ρ, 60). And Crispin continues on his search made "vivid by the sea." In the traditional terms of the realityimagination conflict, he learns that the human imposition of romance is distortion and that he needs "an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,/ Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,/ Green barbarism turning paradigm" (P, 61). " T h e affectionate emigrant found/ A new reality in parrot-squawks" (P, 62). He joins the reality side of the controversy and he becomes himself a mere observer, a "connoisseur of elemental fate" (P, 63). His reduction to "nothing himself" does not in any way lead to comfort. When the storm strikes, he, like all the rest, takes refuge in the cathedral and is driven to search further. Crispin then exchanges his southern habitat for Carolina and, traveling there, envisions it a cold and dimly lit scene. The moon replaces the sun in Crispin's imaginative vision of his promised land. Upon arrival, however, "he saw that it was spring,/ A time abhorrent to the nihilist/ O r searcher for the fecund minimum./ The moonlight fiction disappeared" (P, 65). Crispin had been projecting an image of himself upon Carolina as if he had never undergone the reduction of Part I. The thing outside in the world, however, manifests itself to him with such force that the self-satisfying projection is disrupted: "It purified. It made him see how much/ O f what he saw he never saw at all" (P, 66). Crispin again learns the lesson of " T h e Snow Man." His ability to "behold" is distorted by the imagination which creates comforting fancies of final paradises. [202]

Wallace Stevens Yet even at this point in his quest, Crispin believes that he can work through the distortion to a source, an essence: He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last. (P, 66)

This is one of the clearest examples of Stevens' use of what Riddel, following Derrida, calls the language of presence. If, as D e r rida argues, the concept of center or source always implies "presence" then in this case the inverse is also true. The language here clearly shows that Crispin wants an unchanging, transcendent center to be the result of his quest and the origin of all his poetry: essence, Being, unity, integritas. T h e "at last" betrays Crispin's intention most thoroughly. H e wants an end to this quest which so far has only brought him through the uncomfortable destruction of various of his o w n cherished fictions. In Part V, Crispin seems to have stopped his wanderings and to have found a viable and permanent aesthetic. His imaginative powers stop imposing on the other and he looks at "things within his actual eye" (P, 70). H e is about to arrive at an aesthetic which gives priority to the "external world" and, paradoxically, finds transience in the fictional world of the imagination. Before this is even clearly stated, however, Stevens tells us "It seemed haphazard denouement." (P, 70) By n o w the reader is in on Stevens' game and k n o w s the significance of a Romantic quest which "ends" by chance. The very idea of an "ending" in this poem contradicts the burden of the poetry. Nonetheless, Crispin seems to come to rest in an aesthetic which echoes that of the end of "Peter Quince at the Clavier": He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matinal continent [203]

Wallace Stevens May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist. The words of things entangle and confuse. The plum survives its poems. It may hang In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground Obliquities of those who pass beneath, Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved In bloom. Yet it survives its own form, Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit. So Crispin hasped on the surviving form, For him, of shall or ought to be in is.

CP. 70) Crispin thinks that he has found a compromise position between his commitment to reality and his desire for a permanent center which will let him " b e content." The re-interpretation of the possibility of arriving at any such point in this poem, as well as Stevens' prefatory disclaimer, undercuts Crispin's desire and seeming discovery. The similarity of Crispin's position to that of Peter Quince reemphasizes the way in which Stevens reevaluates himself and his own early poetry. This is a trait which emerges from the centerless nature o f his vision and which he never abandons. Crispin desperately holds onto the possibility of comfort in this new fiction. In this "surviving form" he not only finds what-is, as does "the listener" o f " T h e Snow Man," but he abandons the future and time itself in the presence of being as well. The "shall or ought to b e " point to the future. They point to willful action, to change, to moral situations—all things which might disrupt the comfort brought by an aesthetic based on a static, or at least cyclically recurring, vision of external nature. In the last section o f the poem, Crispin settles into domestic stasis, which is analogous to his aesthetic vision of nature. As a result, his imagination and all vitality are worn away. He creates off-shoots o f his own slumping self and recognizes his trap. He then comes to a "position" which is final insofar as it is the literal end of the poem on the page; but even this is surely not final or [204]

Wallace Stevens "true." He accepts his last social and artistic fiction as his fate. H e adopts the posture of the long-suffering Romantic poet, forced to abandon his world of dreams and imaginative ease for the sake of social obligation, for the ease of his "reality principle": Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The world, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stifFest realist, Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace or grumble. (P, 74)

Crispin must "concoct" a value, a final message f r o m his journey for the sake of success and comfort. H e writes as though he has never learned the truth of the reduction to the state of nothing, that is, that all structures are fictions and man-made for the relief of tension and anxiety. Stevens' narrative comment upon Crispin's position is heavily ironic. H e describes the journey and the poem as "anecdote" thereby reducing its significance and reinforcing the fact that it is after all a fiction based, like all poems, on nothing. This last section is filled with hypothetical sentence structures from which a tentative "conclusion" might be drawn: Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote Is false, if Crispin is a profidess Philosopher, beginning with green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper he abates in taste, Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure, Glozing his life with after-shining flicks, Illuminating from a fancy gorged By apparition, plain and common things, Sequestering the fluster from the year, Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops, [205]

Wallace Stevens And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end? (P, 75)

According to Vendler, Stevens' use of "ifs," questions, and subjunctives is designed to display uncertainty, a "diffident didacticism."18 In this poem, though, the effect is exactly the opposite. Mrs. Vendler has been "deceived" by the comedy. Crispin is, in fact, a failure in the quest. He can exist in the quest f o r m only as a means of destroying it. As a result, the hypothetical clauses of the last stanza continue the deconstruction by ironically suggesting all of Crispin's failures in a speculative frame. Stevens exaggerates his own "syntactic uncertainty" 1 9 at Crispin's expense, and those of us w h o fail to laugh along with Stevens fail to understand the playfullness of the poem. T h e result of this decreation of the quest figure and of some elements of Stevens' o w n early style is very serious. Crispin does distort because he creates fictions which he fails to see rest on an uncertain base. H e has proven that "what he proves I Is nothing," but he, of course, is blind to his own insight. T h e rhetorically unstressed " n o t h i n g " of the final stanza easily escapes any significance unless w e understand the end of the poem in terms of Stevens' radical interpretation of fiction. Crispin proves himself to be nothing. H e proves nothing to be at the center. Most importantly, as a poetic device, he proves nothing in t w o senses: he shows no finality in the working out of his story—as a poetic device he proves to be nothing of final value; yet, as a device, what he does positively prove or confirm "Is nothing." H e demonstrates to the reader and poet the truth of " T h e Snow M a n . " All of what-is shares in nothingness, which is the origini ess origin. Thus " T h e Comedian as the Letter C " is not, as Vendler says, a failed attempt by Stevens to make himself "into a ribald poet of boisterous devotion to the gaudy, the gutsy, and the burly"; nor is it a "verbal mimetic reproduction . . . of the ac[206]

Wallace Stevens tuai density of the physical world." 2 0 The poem is a sophisticated use of a traditional poetic device whose value for modern poetry and modern man is no longer obvious until destroyed. Vendler ignores Stevens' claims that all structures are fictions and ignores the conscious use of convention, motif, and idea which this implies. Instead of seeing the poem as an "interpretation" of its own language which makes manifest what is "covered-up" by the quest, Vendler insists on writing about the poem as if it were using language free of tradition and social situation. As Roland Barthes argues in Writing Degree Zero, modern writers are preoccupied by the realization that their language does not come to them fresh; it has been used before, made into shapes which they cannot use. As a result, when the modern poet creates, he must and does do so with a fully developed awareness that he must reinterpret the language he uses in the process of making something his own. 2 1 This process of re-interpretation goes on throughout Stevens' career. He continues to use the traditional language of the imagination-reality conflict in his poetic thinking. Most importantly, though, he thinks about, he re-interprets, the "fiction" that there is nothing at the center. The theme of "The Snow Man" recurs again and again and is most exhaustively questioned in the very late poetry. There is in Stevens' poetry a curious alternation of opposites which critics ascribe to his "Romantic heritage." Like Roy Harvey Pearce, they claim that Stevens' alternating sympathy in the reality-imagination conflict is a dialectical movement which will lead to a synthesis. This is, of course, a convenient and comfortable way of justifying, and thereby eliminating by resolution, the "simultaneous" existence of opposites in Stevens. Since Stevens comes to no conclusion, to no balancing point between the elements of the dialectic, a more profitable way to look at these contradictions arises from Stevens' centerless vision. If all poetic structures are fictions with only partial value for humanity and if there is no privileged point of reference against which ideas may be measured, then the idea of contradiction which in itself [207]

Wallace Stevens emerges from the language of "presence," of onto-theology, is a fiction which should not be granted any superior metaphysical status. T w o late poems, " N o t Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" and "The Rock," are good examples of Stevens' sympathy for "unreconciled" antitheses. "The Rock" questions the primacy of matter over imagination, whereas "Not Ideas" asserts the certitude of objects' existence independently of the mind. " T h e Rock" opens with a radical statement of the priority of imagination over reality: It is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air. Regard the freedom of seventy years ago. It is no longer air. The houses still stand, Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness. Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain. The lives these lived in the mind are at an end. They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar Were not and are not. Absurd. (P, 362) The passage of time calls duration into doubt and the seemingly permanent existence of objects is seen as illusion. O n the one hand, the reality which these objects has is seen from the present perspective as a product of the human imagination. On the other, the sounds of the guitar, that is, the "fictions" which the imagination produces and which are considered real, fade and reveal their fundamentally illusory nature. They rest on no firm center and therefore have no permanence. These objects and events are all "An invention . . . a queer assertion of humanity" (P, 362). They are "proposed" "As if nothingness contained a métier" (Ρ, 363). In the face of emptiness and of change in the world, the imagination puts forth, proposes these fictions as real [208]

Wallace Stevens objects which exist "out-there" and which are comprehensible to man: A vital assumption, an impermanence In its permanent cold, an illusion so desired That the green leaves came and covered the high rock That the lilacs came and bloomed. . . .

(P, 363)

The force of the human will compels the creation of these fictions. The self so wants a comforting illusion that it creates a soothing, yet impermanent illusion to populate the cold emptiness which truly endures. The flowers cover the barren rock and satisfy the self by putting sight of something in the place of a vision of nothing. "The Rock" image itself, throughout the poem, is not identified with any finality, any ultimate source, but rather, paradoxically, with "barrenness," "the air," and "The step to the bleaker depths of his descents" (P, 364). The rock is an image of the nothingness of what-is. It represents a complete barrenness, an ultimate progression downward toward no goal. The traditional usages of this metaphor are thus inverted and what the trope always hides is made clear. Nonetheless, the poem goes on to establish a new fiction of relation between the self and the other (the rock), which seems to commit Stevens to the "imagination" side of the "traditional" controversy: It is the rock where tranquil must adduce Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind, The starting point of the human and the end, That in which space is contained, the gate To the enclosure, day, the things illumined By day, night and that which night illumines. Night and its midnight-minting fragrances, Night's hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.

(P, 365)

[209]

Wallace Stevens The mind of imagination will contain all of what-is; space and the mind will be coextensive so that all of what exists does so only by the grace of the imagination. This "reality" "exists" only in the dreamlike state of vision. The complete primacy of the imagination to the world outside only occurs "as in a vivid sleep." In this poem, what Vendler calls Stevens' "uncertain syntax" is relevant, because this imaginative perception shares only some qualities with the dream state; the daylight vision nonetheless remains different because it pretends to be real. " N o t Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" questions this power o f the mind to intrude into what exists out-there in any meaningful way: At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow . . . It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier-mâché . . . The sun was coming from outside. That scrawny cry—It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. (P, 387-88) The poem begins with a perception and with the mind's attempt to bring that perception within itself and make a mental con[210]

Wallace Stevens struct of it. The triple repetition of "outside" prevents the reader, and the persona, from obscuring the separation between self and bird. Although the persona comes to know a truth, that is, that the cry exists independently of the perception of it, he also learns that this involves a constant separation of self and other which cannot really be bridged. The fiction that the imagination creates significance is de-created by the second stanza. In the third stanza, in fact, there is an explicit denial of the concluding fiction of "The Rock." In that poem, reality resides in the mind's active perception in a moment erf" "vivid sleep." In this poem, the "source" of the bird's cry is most emphatically taken away from the realm of the mental. The type of imagination which the persona praises in "The Rock" is here derogatorily classified as a "vast ventriloquism." The point of this metaphor, of course, is the denial of primacy, of origin, to the imagination which functions only as a mouthpiece, as it were, of something else, beyond human creation. For the persona of this poem, the other exists independently in reality. It does not depend on any source for its being, nor does it take part in any questionable ontological state like "sleep's faded papier-mâché." In this poem, then, the primacy of the imagination is temporarily replaced by the fiction of complete immanence, which holds that the other can completely manifest itself and its Being so that its "meaning," its "nature," can be understood primordially. The poem certainly moves in that direction and, in fact, seems to arrive at this "final" position. The simile of the last two lines, however, points out that this idea of the revelation of the other and the gathering of new knowledge is also fiction. By comparing "The Rock" and "Not Ideas," it becomes obvious that Stevens is not attempting any synthetic resolution of the elements of a dialectic. He is not trying to establish within each poem a final paradox which resolves tension in a literary figure. He continues to demonstrate that all fictions are just that and that the idea of final harmony is an impossibility. Critics who are disturbed by his seemingly contradictory ideas fail to see [211]

Wallace Stevens that they are victims of their own blindness, which makes noncontradiction and achieved harmonies privileged, centered positions based on what they think is "presence." Stevens could only be accused of inconsistency if he failed to turn his poetic "destruction" back upon the vision of "The Snow Man." "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" is concerned with the interpretation of "The Snow Man." After a thorough examination of the idea of nothingness and of the form of the meditation Stevens claims: This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subder, more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness. The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (P, 349)

The poem decreates the poetic meditation which it takes careful pains to parallel from its initial composition of place. Unlike traditional meditations, however, this poem does not end in an order "found by the poet in moments of supreme awareness . . . by an integrated mind and sense. " 22 This poem is open-ended; it never arrives at the sort of final vision which Louis Martz claims for the meditative poem. Furthermore, "An Ordinary Evening" establishes, explicitly, a correspondence between the nature of poetry and of life; both elaborate endlessly. His poetry, then, is "created from nothingness," just as all human achievement, just as all of what-is shares in nothingness. The traditional conflict of imagination and reality is surpassed in Stevens' poetry. He realizes that both sides of the controversy are fictional discourses, strategies to comfort their respective adherents in the face of the nothingness which is at the root of all. Just as poets and other men hide behind fictional structures, so Stevens allows his poetry [212]

Wallace Stevens to create through "the intricate evasions of as." This is, of course, no simplistic escapism; rather, it makes poetic reinterpretation possible. The existence of all traditional fictions becomes the subject for Modern poetry. In the very late poem, "As You Leave the Room," Stevens develops the most explicit reconsideration of "The Snow Man" vision. This poem invokes fictions which demonstrate the primacy of imagination over reality and it asks, "I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,/ As a disbeliever in reality" (Ρ, 396). If Stevens were a merely dialectical poet in the Romantic tradition, he would then move on in the poem to an assertion of the source of reality in the outside world. This pattern is, of course, expected by the reader. Stevens, however, proceeds to a more complex position which is neither an assertion of the primacy of the external nor an attempted synthesis: Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomes Part of a major reality, part of An appreciation of a reality And thus an elevation, as if I left With something I could touch, touch every way. And yet nothing has been changed except what is Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all. (P, 396)

These lines open with an emphasis on the current time and situation of the poem, surely to point out that this is a reconsideration of a previous fiction and also to verify that each poem is the cry of its own occasion, that it is rooted in a particular historical and dramatic context. The snow starts to be transformed in these lines as it reappears in the poet's active thinking. The metamorphosis, of course, occurs not by virtue of the poet's imagination alone, but also by reason of the changed time and place of this poem which necessarily must be a different fiction than one of thirty-five years earlier. The snow seems to become part of a reality out-there when [213]

Wallace Stevens he says that it is part of a "major reality," but this appearance is corrected in the next phrase which further refines the nature of this "reality": "part ofí An appreciation of reality." Snow, which in the earlier poem reveals nothingness and destroys the veil which hides this nothingness, is now part of a "reality" which is constituted by virtue of poetic appreciation. "Appreciation" may be used with etymological preciseness as Pearce, in his misreading of this poem, would have it and, if so, it does imply that "major reality" does grow or "become" by virtue of accretion. 23 Experience then piles up or accretes and elevates the poet to a point of final perception. This is strikingly like the Romantic quest to return to a higher vision of original unity. But while Pearce is correct in pointing out the etymology of "appreciate," he does so at the expense of a more obvious and, I think, more valuable meaning. "Appreciation" also implies an act of evaluation which ends favorably. It signifies a sensitive and proper awareness of the other. In a poem in which the self fears that he is nothing but a skeleton as a result of denying objective existence to the other, this interpretation of "appreciation" seems much more consistent. Stevens approaches that attitude to reality which Randall Jarrell, speaking of William Carlos Williams, calls "generosity" and Heidegger calls Gelassenheit.24 This involves a willingness to accept the other for what it is and a refusal to attempt to impose human significance on something essentially foreign to the human. This is born out by what for Stevens is a strange insistence on the tactile qualities of existence: " . . . as if I leftI With something I could touch, touch every way." Throughout his poetry, whenever he sides with the reality part of the conflict with imagination, Stevens' sympathy for an immanental relation to the other appears. In this late poetry, however, it occurs in the process of rethinking the vision of "The Snow Man." In "The Course of a Particular," for example, the value of the other's independent and meaningful existence is asserted despite that "in the final finding of the ear . . . / . . . the cry concerns no one at all" (P, 367). In "As You Leave the R o o m , " [214]

Wallace Stevens however, immanence and "The Snow Man" come to a more complex relationship. The poem describes the phenomenological effects on the self of a generous attitude toward reality and it does so with complete sympathy. Stevens, though, is too honest to allow this effect to stand unexamined. He concludes that this too is a fiction; it is only "as if" he acquired the sensation of touch which ends estrangement. What changes as a result of this réévaluation of some of his past fiction and of the phenomenon of immanence is only what is "unreal." "Nothing," which is the root of what-is, escapes unchanged; nothing even escapes this attempt to eliminate it. This recognition does not, however, imply a failure for Stevens. Although the "unreal" alone changes, man can know nothing more except the originless origin. To attempt anything "beyond" this would be to refuse the lesson of the listener's reduction in "The Snow Man" and countless other poems. It would be an attempt to live in bad faith by denying the fictional nature of even the most humanly valuable and sympathetic attitudes, like "generosity."

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Chapter Six

The Particularities of Tradition: History and Locale in The Maximus Poems ι Until very recently Charles Olson's poetry has been consistently omitted from critical analyses of the "tradition" of American poetry as well as from critical attempts to define " M o d e r n " poetry. Some of his fellow poets and former students have tried to impress upon the critical establishment the importance of Olson's achievement and of his goals, but for the most part these attempts have met with little success. The almost total silence surrounding Olson's work testifies both to the pervasive influence of the N e w Criticism among the current generation of critics as well as to the degree of Olson's difference from the American and Modern traditions which the N e w Criticism defines. Indeed, in "A Retrospective Introduction" to Modern Poetry and the Tradition, written in 1965 for the rerelease of his text, Cleanth Brooks completely omits any mention of Olson's work. Brooks acknowledges that he should perhaps have given more attention to Williams and to Pound in his book to discover what separates their works from those of Eliot. He recognizes that Pound and Williams are the most important influences upon contemporary poetry. Yet, he resists Donald Hall's claim that these poets and their contemporary, postmodern heirs possess a new imagination (MP, xx). After quoting Hall's introduction to his [217]

Charles Olson anthology of 1963, Contemporary American Poetry,1 Brooks claims that the structure of the poems of this new imagination is essentially the same as that of the Modern works he had described in earlier editions of Modem Poetry and the Tradition: "The poet j u x taposes t w o images, and hopes that the steel of the first will strike a spark from the flint of the second, and thus kindle the reader's imagination" (MP, xx). Brooks completely misunderstands the importance of Williams and Pound to contemporary poets: postmodern poets turn to Paterson and The Cantos to discover a less dehumanized way of writing poems in the world than, for example, the N e w Critical writing of the Fugitives. Brooks does not allow those elements of Williams' poems and of Pound's late Cantos which are contrary to the ironic, spatialized poetics of the N e w Criticism to emerge. His habituation to close verbal analysis, predicated upon a principle of ironic context, coerces poems like Paterson and The Pisan Cantos into the traditional mold of closed form, of ironically constructed aesthetic monads. Despite his familiarity with Hall's anthology of postmodern American poetry, Brooks offers Robert Lowell's and Randall Jarrell's poems as evidence that "the poetry of the 1920s was not too narrowly based and that its principles did not inhibit fruitful development. Lowell and Jarrell fully assimilated the poetry that came to prominence in the 1920s and the critical theory derived from, and illustrated by, it" (MP, xxv). Brooks's ignorance of the poetics of "open f o r m " which Olson's essay, "Projective Verse," 2 asserts as a manifesto of postmodern poetry, not only causes him to disregard Olson, but to coerce the later poetry of Lowell, "Skunk H o u r " and "For the Union Dead," for example, into the tighter forms of Lowell's earlier verse and to claim that Lowell's ability to order "intellectual wit" controls the late, irrational, " m a d " poems of Roethke. This brief examination of Brooks's late poetic assumptions suggests that he had not kept up with the poetic scene. Brooks's metaphysics and the methodology which arises out of it are not adequate to a poetry of open form which defines [218]

Charles Olson itself in opposition to the Modernist ideals of the concrete universal, ironic form, and autotelic structure out of which his own habits of reading emerge. Brooks's resistance to the innovations of Pound, Williams, and Olson in "A Retrospective Introduction" is indicative of Modern critical desires to retain—or construct—the continuity of "tradition." As the studies of Bate and Bloom in chapter one suggest, Modern critics have an existential and ontological stake in maintaining a union of texts, a "canon," whose imaginative order, unchanging structure, and objective status assure ontological security. When so rigidly conceived, the "tradition" is precisely the bulwark against natural process and history which Bate and Bloom perceive it to be. In this context, Brooks's coercion of Pound, Williams, the late Lowell, and the late Roethke into the N e w Critical "tradition" of " M o d e r n , " and notably, "American" poetry emerges not merely as critical blindness, but as a necessary evasion of discontinuity which the N e w Criticism's metaphysical stance, unmastered irony, requires. Change, disruption, process, and finitude are not only the characteristics of open form, but they are the defining traits of a discontinuous "tradition." However, they are also those marks of being-in-the-world which the N e w Critical impulse to godhead attempts to transcend. I have argued in chapter four that the N e w Critical objection to open form requires that the Modern and American "traditions" largely omit the work of Whitman, Lawrence, and W . C . Williams. For example, Allen Tate's 1969 anthology of criticism, Six American Poets from Emily Dickinson to the Present,3 not only credits Dickinson with being the first Modern American poet, but also completely ignores postmodern poets of open form. In a similar way, Louis Martz, in The Poem of the Mind,4 illuminates the Modernist poetic tradition as well as the nature of what Modern critics mean by an "American" tradition. Martz's meditative tradition begins with Southwell and Donne and an examination of the idea of the metaphysical imagination. His decision to "begin" the tradition with the metaphysical Donne does not need any explanation; it is quite explicitly connected to [219]

Charles Olson the admiration for Donne in both Eliot's criticism and that of the New Critics. Modernist critics return to Donne as the last figure whose imagination is ironic enough to represent the complexity of correspondences o f the unified sensibility. Following T . S . Eliot, Martz argues that the "tradition" dies in England with the Restoration and Neoclassical revival o f the eighteenth century. This argument also echoes that of Brooks in Modem Poetry and the Tradition. However, the "tradition" survives, in fact flourishes, according to Martz, in the poems of the American writer Edward Taylor who "has a place in literary history as the last heir of the great tradition of English meditative poetry." 5 As Martz's succeeding readings o f American poets reveal, he quite clearly thinks of Taylor as the "beginning" of the American "tradition," which poets like Stevens, Williams, and Roethke maintain. In order to assure the absolute continuity o f the "tradition" which he is describing, Martz argues that there are no disruptive native American elements in Taylor's poetry. Unlike W . C . Williams, who condemns the Puritan poets for not being in touch with the land, 6 Martz insists that it is precisely this absence of the local which makes possible the preservation, the imitation 7 of the "tradition." Williams attacks Taylor's type of poetry for being "steely" and firm,8 written by one o f the "elect," from the perspective of unquestioned clarity and certainty which allows Puritan poets to ignore the dispersed "processes" of "nature" and "language" in which they create; Martz, on the other hand, defends this forgetting o f the wilderness as the condition which keeps the meditative form from contamination by the reductive wit and decorum o f the eighteenth century. In opposition to Williams' In the American Grain, Martz defines the American tradition as a purely formal achievement, an imitation o f European forms, made possible precisely by Taylor's disinterest in the land and the particular details of his "locale." Martz's larger biases against the "geographical" and personal nature of open poems of process emerge from his definition of a meditative poem—a definition which establishes the direct descendence o f his version [220]

Charles Olson of the tradition f r o m the ironic N e w Critics: " . . . most of these essays deal with poetry of the interior life, where the mind, acutely aware of an outer world of drifting unstable forms, finds within itself the power to create coherence and significance."9 Like the N e w Critics, Bate, and B l o o m , Martz's poetics and analysis proceed f r o m the assumption of a dualistic universe in which mind and its desired order are in painful conflict with a chaotic external world. His meditative "tradition" is a fiction blinded to its o w n fictional nature by the "natural attitude" of the Cartesian-Leibnizian inheritance. As a result of this entrapment within the onto-theological tradition, Martz perceives "art" to be an alternative to "life." He sees the creation of poems as a manifestation of that "will to art" which is an unchallenged assumption behind the poetics of T . E . H u l m e and the aesthetics of Wilhelm W o r r i n g e n 1 0 The dualistic division of life and art which Martz manifests, and which clearly dominates the N e w Criticism and the works of Bate and Bloom, places man in opposition to nature, to whatever lies "outside" the mind. Furthermore, the will to art asserts the mental " p o w e r " over nature which allows man to dominate and control. It imposes order upon nature by transforming "life" into "art"; it creates closed artifacts, individual poems and "traditions" which the ironic mind can contemplate. T h e "meditative" p o e m is not only Gnostic in its attempt to impose order upon "chaos," but it participates in the same coercive tendency of mind which in technology leads to the despoiling of the environment. 1 1 Martz, like Brooks in "A Retrospective Introduction," coerces the poetry of Williams, Roethke, and Stevens into this meditative mold. And, also like Brooks, he totally ignores the work of Charles Olson. T h e complete absence of Olson f r o m Martz's criticism indicates that Olson's poems and criticism are so violently opposed to the entire mental set of the dualistic, coercive N e w Criticism and its "tradition" that they successfully resist any attempt to bring them within the "tradition." Olson's works illustrate what should be the primary insight of all historically aware, destructive criticism: poems d o violence to their in-

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Charles Olson terpreters and potentially destroy methods of criticism which are used to "illuminate" them. Clearly, the complete omission of Olson's works by ironic critics of context suggests that they are both blind to the potentialities of the forms Olson creates and that they sense the potential danger to their own versions of criticism inherent in his poems. T h e presence of Whitman, Williams, a deconstructed Stevens, and Charles Olson is either covered-over completely or distorted in received literary "histories" which establish the " A m e r ican Tradition," particularly in Modern verse, because of the spatial, ironic, timeless set of habitual assumptions which is almost invariably brought to the poems and imposed upon them. T h e deconstructions of the genetic, dualistic, ironic, and Adamic fictions in previous chapters show that a critical methodology and literary history resting upon these fictions obscures alternative possibilities for interpretation and history. T h e traditional mentality which underlies criticism of American poetry protects the critics f r o m the ontological insecurity they dread when confronted by a world which they see as inimicable to their wills and different f r o m their desires. Most specifically, the tradition of Modern criticism avoids change and time by projecting monadic poetic structures and continuous literary traditions. Although in the 1960s, under the impact of both those poets w h o m the N e w Criticism ignores and those critical theories developed out of the phenomenology of interpretation, some American critics began to examine these habitual assumptions, most evaluations of the American tradition failed to consider the radically anti-tradition-al nature of poets like Whitman and Olson. T h e criticism of the 1960s makes especially clear precisely h o w habitually present the N e w Critical metaphysics and hermeneutics is—even a m o n g those w h o use it unconsciously—as the methodological approach to American poetry. In an undistinguished but typical anthology of criticism, American Poetry (edited by Irvin Ehrenpreis), Louis D . Rubin, Jr. explicitly identifies the poetics of the Fugitive poets—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and John C r o w [222]

Charles Olson Ransom—with the critical theories o f closure underlying the New Criticism: Among the chief Fugitives there was a commitment to form, an insistence upon the poem as existing within its language and on the page, with the responsibility for creating its own meaning, that contrasted sharply with the loose, undisciplined, formless experimentalism of so much little magazine verse of the period. What interested die Fugitives most was language, its properties, its concreteness; their poetry tended towards the tightly-seeded, packed line with the energy of the poem focused on the way in which images worked with and against other images to produce a kind of poetry, which however complex and even dense it might appear on quick reading, developed from beginning to end a controlled, cohesive meaning in which each image, each line, was part of the total movement of the poem. It is not surprising that Ransom, Tate, Warren, and their somewhat younger friend Cleanth Brooks were to prove the leading proponents of the critical development which Ransom was to christen the New Criticism.12 Rubin's own analysis o f the Fugitives in "Four Southerners" quite appropriately pursues a New Critical approach to explicate the densities and complexities o f the self-contained aesthetic monad. The full significance of this essay, however, is not what it says or even how it says it, but rather its position within the anthology itself. With the exception o f this article, the other pieces in American Poetry are arranged chronologically according to the dates of the poets treated. "Four Southerners" is presented first in the collection. It is presented as the normal way to read poems and as a defense of the kind o f criticism and poems which made the New Criticism normative. In fact, a statement which closes the paragraph quoted above makes quite clear the privileged position which the Fugitive poetics and the New Criticism possess in relation to the rest of American poetry: "They taught a generation o f students how to read." Within the anthology itself, the New Criticism determines the set of guiding assumptions which [223]

Charles Olson are brought to the readings, the interpretations in the rest of the anthology, and the "correct" way to read all poems as well. Within such an unquestioned, "normative" context for criticism, Walter Sutton writes in "Criticism and Poetry" that Olson and his followers are failures: A persistent and typical weakness of these lines [from "The Kingfishers") is the lack of a shaping force that can absorb "influences" by subordinating and fusing borrowed elements within the poet's own individual expression. There is instead a comparatively relaxed poetic line with many unassimiiated details and echoes of the masters. Like many other poets of die third generation [of Modernism], Olson has committed himself to a revolutionary theory of organic form without having succeeded in carrying its principles into practice.13 The New Critical habit brings with it a picture of the eternal sameness of all poetry: form is defined by closure created by ironic context. As a methodology, it is trapped within the vicious circle of logic; its criteria are frozen and cannot develop in response to a poem. Therefore, all poems "misread" New Critically are either the same poem—i.e., the poem of irony—or, like Olson's, "failures." This commitment to method as an unquestioned assumption of reading is a privileged center which keeps the critic from becoming involved in the process o f encounter with the text. It provides a ground, a certainty, which can only maintain the defense o f the critic—the coercive Gnostic—if it is not exposed to works like Olson's, which threaten to destroy it. The fact that Harold Bloom's Map of Misreading is trapped within a similar circle indicates how many of the "opponents" o f the New Criticism remain within the same metaphysical context as Brooks and Wimsatt. As I have pointed out in chapter one, Bloom must either admit the possibility of his method's inadequacy—and therefore the possibility that literature is not different from life, is not a bulwark against time and nature—or decide that literature has come to an end. In an apotheosis of the hubris of Modern criticism, he announces the death of poetry. [224]

Charles Olson The examples of N e w Critical versions of the "tradition" could be multiplied extensively. Yet the result would always be the same, just as the "tradition" and "forms" which are made to appear in these N e w Critical texts are always identical. There is no substantial change registered between Brooks's version of the tradition in 1939 and Martz's in 1966. Tate's insistence upon closed form as the criteria for "Modern" poetry is the same in 1969 as it is in his essays in The Ketty on Review. Modern criticism has been writing the same story of Modern and American poetry for the past fifty years. And while there are some indications that things are changing—in those critics like de Man, Scott, Hillis Miller, Riddel, Hartman, and Spanos—a history of this Modern American poetry which would move the "tradition" off the "center" of N e w Critical form has yet to be written. For example, Edward Hungerford's Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to Ten Contemporary Americans14 omits all comment on Olson and is concerned with those poets who made their reputation during the period of the New Criticism's greatest authority—Lowell, Wilbur, Jarrell, and Merwin—and those like Robert Bly who can be seen to be, in many ways, the contemporary version of the N e w Critical poet. (Bly's 1962 collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, reflects precisely the epiphanic, lyrical concerns of Tate's and Warren's poems, although with a more humane sense of the limits of linguistic complexity.) Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry is certainly not an obviously N e w Critical book, yet, as some of my comments on Pearce's treatment of Stevens' poems indicate, Pearce's own orientation remains essentially te/